A Thought and a Shadow
by Casey V
Summary: You are not Sora. You *were* Sora. What you are now is a fragment. A splinter. A coin that fell through a hole in his pocket and was left behind. You must not call yourself by that name." But Roxas never wanted to be the hero. Axel/Roxas and others
1. 1

**PLEASE NOTE: This story is already complete.** There are 6 chapters and I will be getting them all posted here over the next few days after I get all the formatting fixed. So--just don't make the mistake of thinking "Holy crap she updates super-fast!" because I don't. It was finished before being posted. Got it? We cool? We're cool. Onward!

**Standard Disclaimer:** I do not own Kingdom Hearts. I do, however, own a Roxas action figure, which brandishes ice cream at me regularly.

**Warnings:** Language, violence, boy/boy situations (up to and including sex), spoilers for KH, KH2 and probably CoM as well.

**Pairings:** Axel/Roxas, with some Riku/Roxas that is really Riku/Sora, and also some actual Riku/Sora. Par for the course.

**Casey would like you to note:** I think this might be substantial proof that Roxas really is my favorite character. Watch as I cease attempting to deny it.

I'm aware that some of this doesn't line up with canon, particularly the parts revealed by Final Mix. I made this discovery after the fic was in progress and I already had the whole thing worked out. It concerned me for a while, but ultimately I decided to stick with the story as I originally envisioned it. Changing it would have compromised the integrity of the story, and that should become clear once you've read it. It just wouldn't have been the same. So—please forgive my willful ignorance.

* * *

_"...I say to you that she loves you more truly than me; for you she loves and knows; but in me she loves only a shadow and a thought: a hope of glory and great deeds, and lands far beyond."_

J.R.R. Tolkien

* * *

**1.**

He came into existence, despite the circumstances, in much the same way as any other human being in the universe did: naked and screaming.

Naked, mostly because when the golden specks of matter that had been floating in the air like so many dust motes a moment before converged back onto themselves to reform into something approaching the mold they had been in previously, they did not consider trivialities such as clothing. Creating a full and complete being out of nothing was difficult and energy-consuming enough without attending to fabric vanities in addition to building vast and complex cellular structures, carefully balanced organ systems, neuropathways and taste buds.

Screaming, mostly, because existence _hurt_. Screaming because in one uncharted second one hundred trillion cells started moving and splitting and dying, six hundred and forty muscles flexed and relaxed, twenty-one internal organs began working and one hundred billion nerve receptors came to life and shot one hundred billion messages to a newly-formed brain, which scrambled to process this and to process just exactly what _feeling_ was and what was hot as opposed to cold and furthermore why it and the rest of the body it occupied was there, when a second ago it hadn't been.

His first thought was: What the _fuck_?

His second thought was longer and more complicated and involved questioning his understanding of language, his sense of self, and knowledge of the difference between a word and an epithet, and his knowledge of the spelling and pronunciation of several of the latter.

Something made him think that he hadn't learned all of this on his own, and his third thought was even longer and more complicated and involved wondering who he was, _what_ he was, where he was and how he'd gotten there, and why he existed when he hadn't been anything mere seconds before now.

The only response he had for himself for each of these questions was: I don't know.

The first emotion he felt was fear.

Fear, he decided, was not very pleasant. It coiled in his stomach and snaked tendrils up his spine to wrap around his throat until he felt very much like he wanted to just remain here, curled up tightly around himself on whatever cold, hard surface he had been inexplicably born onto. And yet, at the same time, the fear felt strangely dull. Almost like he wasn't fully connected with it.

This was the first of many things he would yet discover that were decidedly Wrong.

He opened his eyes for the first time to a world that shifted and blurred. He watched it carefully, heavy lidded as it righted itself and consolidated into a single image. He blinked slowly, twice, and listened cautiously to the space around him, silent with the shifting of air now that the screaming was gone. He drew in a breath and felt his lungs adjusting to the steady pull and release of oxygen. He swallowed the soreness from his throat and shifted his tongue forward to wet his lips.

He thought this was the first time he had done any of this, and yet it wasn't strange. He thought he knew the names and ideas for all of these things, but how he knew them escaped him. He just did. He just _was_.

He decided this: that whatever the reason, he was very much living, and cold on a rough stone floor and seeing and hearing and breathing the world around him, and therefore he _was_.

The fear retreated after a moment, back into the deep pit of his stomach and coiled in the darkness to wait.

He tried moving, next. He started by sliding his hands beneath the surface under his cheek, then bent both his elbows to push himself up. Muscles trembled and ached from having never been used before, and yet he could tell they were already developed and strong. He could feel it, could see it in the way they shifted and flexed under his skin.

He held himself there, hands planted on the ground and arms straight and locked, hovering over the floor and staring down at his fingers, until he stopped shaking. And once he had, he looked up.

He was lying at the center of what looked like a shallow crater in a wide, circular floor of reddish-brown rock. Looming before and over and completely enveloping the space stretching feet upon feet above him were twisting and bulging copper pipes, curling around stone and themselves and arching up into something shaped like... like...

And in the center of the behemoth structure was an opening, some kind of doorway, something gigantic and looming and shifting chaotically like smoke and oil over the surface in red and green and blue. Some kind of...

...keyhole?

He sat up, legs curled beneath him and shaking. He could feel it, bone-deep and certain--the things behind that doorway. He could feel them moving and shuffling and laughing softly in the darkness. He could feel the darkness itself, soft as a caress, like a whisper.

_This is where you belong._

His legs wavered when he stumbled to his feet, knees trembling and wanting to buckle beneath him, the feel of his own weight dragging him back down to the blown-out floor. He struggled with it, straightening, forcing his bones and muscles to strengthen and hold him upright, to obey his commands, dammit. And when they did, and when he was standing solidly on both feet, he stumbled and scrambled away, tripping and skidding on the uneven surface, away from that door and the shifting colors and the things beyond it and the whispers for him to come. Come through, come join us, come fall with us...

But something, something he knew without knowing how, told him to get far, far away from the door and never come back.

* * *

For the first day, he wandered aimlessly.

He was inside some kind of large structure, and how large he couldn't deduce because no matter whether he went up or down or left or right it seemed to continue on forever and ever with no way to exit. He started to think that maybe this building, whatever it was, was in fact the entirety of the universe.

There was a ragged and dusty and off-kilter bit of fabric hanging from a pedestal he passed by soon after escaping the room with the strange warping door. He tugged it down and shook it until it wasn't gritty anymore, then wrapped it around his shoulders. It was rather thin and rough and only hung down to his knees, but it was better than nothing at all. It covered the important parts and took the edge off the cold that this place seemed to be permeated with.

Sometimes while he walked he would hear voices, or commotions, or the footsteps of people aside from himself. When this happened, he would double back the way he had come until the rooms and stairs and corridors surrounding him were silent again.

Sometimes while he walked he would find these... _things_. He knew instinctively that they were not like him, and not like the people he heard occasionally in the other rooms and stairs and corridors. The _thin__gs_ were strange and misshapen versions of people, some were bent and withered and some were gigantic and round, and some flew and some floated and all of them had that mark on them--that mark shaped like the doorway he'd run from. All of them felt the same, like the things he'd felt behind that doorway.

He knew what they were called. He knew it but he couldn't find the word, couldn't wrap his mouth around the sound.

He would look at them, and they would stop. He would say, "Go away," and they would slink or stumble or stomp or float off to some other room, some other place, to do whatever it was that strange misshapen _things_ did in a place like this.

Sometimes while he walked he would wonder why. If there was some purpose for him being here or if he would just continue existing like this, skittering around in a strange, gigantic building by himself, not really knowing why or what to do next. He thought that there ought to be some reason for his sudden existence, but there was no one to explain it to him, and anything prior to that moment when he stopped being Nothing and became Something was a long grayish blank in his attempted memory. Like a line that had been erased until it smeared.

Sometimes while he walked he would feel his stomach tightening, but it wasn't because of the fear. Although that was still curled somewhere behind it and still present, though quiet, the tightening was something else. The more he walked, the tighter it became, and eventually it was joined by gurgling and grumbling.

He couldn't identify this, although it was becoming distinctly uncomfortable and irritating, at least until he stepped into a corridor and smelled something in the air. Something pleasant and warm that made the growling louder.

_Food_, his brain supplied.

The door he followed the scent to was ajar, and beyond it was a small room with a small table and a few chairs pulled out in skewed positions around it. On the table were plates and bowls and dishes, most of them containing a medley of unfinished food items. Someone, or several someones, rather, had been enjoying dinner here--and not too long ago, as one of the bowls was still steaming.

He backed out into the hall cautiously and looked up and down. It was deserted, but somewhere at the far end he could hear the echoes of something. Some sort of commotion, the sort he usually turned and hurried away from. Maybe the people had gone down there... maybe it had something to do with those _things_.

He slipped back into the room and pulled the door until it was nearly shut, then surveyed his surroundings. There was another door to his left, opening into a small kitchen, and within that a third door, closed. Alternate escape route, possibly.

He wondered where he'd learned to think that way.

The first thing he ate was a half-full bowl of some kind of soup, still hot and thick and absolutely delicious. He ate a small roll, split and buttered, after that, then started on the vegetables still remaining on the plate in front of him. Then took a long drink from a cold glass of water.

Eating, he decided, was fantastic. A bit too much so, because he realized that there were voices approaching down the hallway, and he hadn't heard them in time to escape.

He darted from the chair he'd picked at random to fall into and raced into the kitchen, skidding to a halt to quietly open the third door and slip past it, pulling it shut behind him. The room was dark and shadowy, lit only by the strip of light underneath the door, but after a moment he could make out the shapes around him.

It was a pantry, rows of shelves holding cans and boxes and some lumpy bags, larger burlap sacks piled on the floor and in the back was a stack of wooden crates. And just beside them, on the wall and embedded in the stone, was a large square of slitted metal. Some kind of grate; a covering, maybe, for the building's ventilation.

When the voices arrived in the room behind him he hurried over to it, pried the cover open and slipped inside.

The space was small and dark, dusty from years of life and probably crawling with all kinds of unpleasant things, but he didn't think about that. He listened to the voices coming from the dining room while he crawled along, echoing through another grate that opened to the dining room, light falling through it in long strips, and down the small tunnel into his ears.

"I can't believe it! Right in the middle of dinner!"

"Stop complaining."

"He's right, you know, if we don't go out and fight them they'll take over the place again."

"But there's so damn _many_ and--hey! Who ate my food?"

"You did, probably."

"Nuh-uh, I still had almost all my soup left! And you _know_ I don't eat my vegetables!"

"Shut up, Yuffie."

"But _some_one _ate_ my _food_! While we were out fighting!"

"Calm down, I'm sure you just forgot. And there's plenty more, so don't worry about it."

"But--"

"Can it."

"But!"

He didn't hear whether the female voice was able to argue her case any further, as he found a vent leading to an adjoining corridor and slipped through it, dusting grit and spiders off of his hair and bit of fabric before continuing with his wandering.

* * *

He curled up in a small closet that night, when his eyes didn't want to stay open anymore, and snuggled into a nest of old cloaks or something that had fallen onto the ground. They smelled like dust and mothballs and time, but he was too tired to care.

He slept. And in his sleep he would see things and hear and feel things that hadn't been there before. They would fade in and out in a steady beat, rhythmically teasing him with glimpses of something incomplete. A lock of red hair. A hand. The edge of a breath. A boy's voice around a half-formed word. A woman humming. A brush against his shoulder. An expanse of blue. The smell of salt. The brief taste of something he had no concept to relate to. A yellow star.

* * *

On the second day, he mapped.

He explored the ventilation shaft a bit further, finding the quickest and least spider-laden route between his closet and the vents leading into the pantry and the dining room. Survival required food, and therefore if he wanted to continue to exist, he would need access to sustenance. The people who walked through the Castle (it was probably a castle, he had decided, and he needed to call it something) had food, and though it probably wasn't very fair to take it from them--he knew there was a word for that, too, but it escaped him--he needed it. And so he would, anyway.

He thought that maybe in exchange he would try to tell the _things_ to not bother the people. Although there were a lot of them, and he wasn't entirely sure they were capable of listening to instructions more complex than "Go away."

He ripped a bit of fabric off the edge of his makeshift cloak and tied it to the doorknob of his closet as a marker, then explored some of the stairways and corridors nearby so he was certain of where his 'home' was. He wandered until he was tired and then crawled back into the vents and waited for the people to leave their dining room so he could sneak into the kitchen for something to eat. The Female Voice was still complaining about how her dinner had vanished the night before. The other voices were still not listening. He watched their feet through the slits in the dining room vent, light shining in bars across his face.

* * *

On the third day, he found the room.

It was two flights of stairs up and three hallways to the left from the corridor his closet was in. It was a corner room, with windows that reached to the high ceiling and thick red carpet on the floor, warm under his feet. There was a large, elegant four-poster bed with curtains hanging around the sides, the same red as the carpet and trailing on the ground. There was a desk, with paper and a quill pen still scattered across it, and an armoire hanging open but empty, and a large square mirror on the wall to one side, next to a door. There was a small, plush chair near the bed, and over and under and scattered around this chair were some clothes. Small clothes, not big enough, certainly, for the people who lived in the Castle. Small enough, maybe, for himself.

He closed the door behind him and let his bit of fabric fall away and hurried over to try them on. They certainly had to be more comfortable than keeping a rag wrapped around himself all day long. There were shoes, too, and warm stockings to keep his feet away from the freezing cold floors.

He wondered, while pulling on pants that were a bit too big, but not too badly so, and socks and shoes, if maybe this room was _meant_ for him, somehow. As he'd been thinking before, about his purpose for existing and being here. Maybe he was supposed to find this room, for some reason. Maybe this was the beginning of Why.

He lifted the shirt to pull it on, and stopped.

He held it closer to his face. He breathed in deeply. That... that _smell_...

He _knew_ it.

Pausing, he drew away for a moment and fingered the yellow fabric. Yellow.

Something flitted across his mind's eye and vanished. He scowled and grit his teeth--he _knew_ it, dammit!--and brought the shirt close again, breathing in and out. Deeply, inhaling the smell, and the coil of fear in the pit of his stomach retreated until it vanished in a small puff of nothing.

The second emotion he felt was something he couldn't identify. It was warm and comforting, it wrapped around him like the sunlight streaming through the windows, it made him relax and want to crawl onto the giant bed and lie there cradled within it. And--

That _something_ flickered through his mind again and he caught it, tugging while it struggled and kicked and tried to escape, tried to pull it forward so he could _see_. Things flashed past him too fast to grasp or process, the ideas of things, warmth and silver and a hand... a _hand_...

The memory squirmed away from him, skittering back into the gray nothing and vanishing, leaving him only with a yellow shirt and the dull feeling the scent had given him. And he was sure, in that moment, that something was very Wrong.

He pulled the shirt on and ran his hands down his sides, hugging the fabric against himself as though he could feel that place again, the deep warm comfort, but it only wavered on the edge of his perception. He could feel his body operating itself beneath his skin, a feeling he'd grown accustomed to since he began to exist. His stomach was happily processing the food he'd eaten an hour before. Up a little further his ribs were shifting while his lungs pushed air in and out. Up a little further under his chest his--

His--

Nothing. There was nothing, there was _nothing_ and there should _be_ something, there should be a beat and a pulse, there should be a--

There should be a--

Heart.

_Heart_. No heart. There was nothing, a great hollow void under his hand, under his skin, in the small cavity in his chest where it ought to be. It was empty. Nothing.

_Heartless_.

No. Nonononono, that wasn't right--couldn't be right, Heartless were those _things_, the misshapen lumps of darkness that slithered and crawled and attacked without impunity anything and everything that had a heart to rip it out and devour it. He wasn't that. He'd been in the Castle, walked down the halls, been close enough to the people there that he could have attacked them, had he wanted to, but he always stayed away. He hid and he watched and the only thing he wanted to devour was the soup that the Other Female Voice made. Heartless didn't eat anything but hearts. Right?

...how did he _know_ all of this, dammit? How? How could he know without knowing and how did he get here and how the hell could anyone or anything exist and go on living _without a HEART_?

The third emotion he felt was anger, and he knew it like he knew the scent on his shirt.

His hands balled into fists and slammed down on the chair before him, raising dust motes and the lingering smell of the room's former owner, though he was pretty sure that whoever it was wasn't coming back. He was on his knees on the floor without knowing it and slamming his knuckles into the carpet, plush but unyielding and bruising and he didn't care.

"What the hell is going on?" He screamed the words without really hearing them, without really caring if someone else were to hear them and discover him. "Why? Why am I here? WHY AM I HERE?"

His voice sounded Wrong in his ears.

* * *

On the fourth day he woke up on the floor of the same room. He vaguely remembered having a one-sided fistfight with the carpet that had lasted until he was sore and bruised and exhausted. His dreams had been full of yellow stars and small white stars and stars that streaked through blackness and fell and fell and _f__el__l_ until they were out of sight, and stars that just... vanished. When he pushed himself up he could feel the texture the carpet had imprinted on his cheek.

That scent was still on his clothes, and in the room all around him, but it was cloying and teasing and danced over his senses without giving him any answers. He decided to leave the room and never come back.

On the way out, he saw the mirror.

He only stared at himself for a moment, covered now in the familiar-smelling and slightly-too-big clothes in blue and yellow. He leaned closer and examined the lines of his face. The color of his eyes. He reached up and ran his fingers through his hair and felt the way the blond locks spiked up and to the side, and in every direction otherwise. He stared at his mouth and the way it was flat and straight and displeased.

It was Wrong. All of it, everything about himself was just _Wrong_ and he didn't know why.

He picked up the chair and threw it against the mirror and watched the shards of it rain down over the carpet in a thousand reflections of himself. He closed the door behind him when he left.

* * *

On the fifth day he found the platform.

It was wide and flat and made of brick, and the wind swept across it in chilly gusts. Standing on it, he could feel sunlight on his shoulders for the first time, breathe untainted air and as he looked out, past the edge and across, he could see the spread of blue sky and the horizon, the curves of hills and the haze of buildings somewhere far in the distance.

He stood there for a while, a step or two from the platform's edge, arms limp at his sides, and stared until the sky began to pink with sunset.

There were no steps, no ladder, nothing leading down aside from a sheer drop over the side into free air. Somewhere hundreds of feet below he thought he saw the tops of trees or bushes, something like ground, but he knew that if he were to attempt to jump that his already brief life would come to a messy end.

He looked back up and out at the horizon, straining to see further and wondering just how far it went. What else might be out there, past that hill or that cloud, what might exist in the universe outside the Castle.

The fourth emotion he felt made his eyes prickle and his throat swell, but somehow he knew that he couldn't express it.

* * *

That night he waited in the vents until the lights in the dining room turned out and the people's voices faded away into the distance. He waited until his eyes and his mind and his stomach told him that it was night, that it was late, and that he wanted to sleep soon. When he couldn't bear the tightness in his belly any longer, he carefully pushed the vent cover open.

A hand fell on his wrist and wrapped around it, tightly.

Distantly, behind the sound of his own shriek and the sound of his captor's growl, he was aware that this was the first time he'd been touched.

"You're the one who's been stealing our food," the person outside the vent said, and he recognized it as the Male Voice, the one that was always deep and short and curt. "Come on out. You're Maleficent's little brat, right? Figured you'd be miles from here by now."

"Let me go!" He pushed against the side of the shaft, propped one foot against it, leverage to tug his hand back. And his free hand was reaching out, curling around empty air, grasping for something that just--wouldn't _appear_ and--

His voice made the man pause. "Wait, you're not--"

"Let me GO!" he shrieked again, tugging with all his might, but the hand pulled him forward and into the frame of the vent, face to face with the man beyond.

The man was frowning, he noted, not scowling in anger. The man had a scar on his face and lanky hair around his ears. The man opened his mouth and his eyes were confused, and his grip loosened slightly, and he said, "S--"

But he didn't hear whatever word would have come, because he kicked the man squarely through the vent and scrambled away, ignoring the yells that followed him. The man was too big to crawl after him, at least not quickly, and the man didn't know the vents the way that he did.

When he slept that night, he dreamed about red wings scrawled on leather, and three hands in a pile atop each other, and about falling. Falling... and falling...

* * *

On the sixth day, he was hungry.

He wedged himself behind a pillar in one of the large ballrooms the Castle had several of, hugging his knees against his chest and fighting down the pulling and gurgling in his stomach. He didn't dare try to return to the kitchen; the man with the long hair and the serious eyes would probably be waiting for him to come back, waiting to capture him and drag him into the light and--

Somehow, he knew that the man would _know_.

He didn't dare go back, but he thought about ways that he might sneak back in. The Heartless seemed to listen to him, maybe he could send some of the weaker ones to keep the people busy long enough that he could slip into the pantry and sneak enough food out to last him for a while, hide it in his closet and maybe do the same later, when it ran out. He wouldn't get to eat the Other Female Voice's soup anymore, which was too bad--it was really, really good--but it would work, for a while.

Although, he'd heard them talking the night before, while he was crouched in the vents and waiting, about leaving. Something about there just being too many Heartless. Something about a small town nearby where they could settle in, clear it out and make it safe for others to come and then whittle away at the Castle when they had time.

He wondered what would happen if they left. How he'd find food. If there would _be_ any food. If he'd be able to follow them.

He wondered if maybe it wouldn't be better to show himself. To give up and go to them and try to say something. Try to explain himself, maybe. He didn't think they'd hate him, even though he'd been taking their food. He wondered if they'd hate him when they found out he didn't have a heart.

But the people--they understood the world. They knew how to live in it. They knew how to cook food and eat at tables, they slept in beds and used closets for hanging coats. They walked down hallways instead of sneaking through vents. They might even know something about the Why of all of this.

And that soup was really, really good.

He wavered on the edge of deciding. He leaned forward and pillowed his head on his knees, staring down at his borrowed shoes and the floor beneath them. He felt like...

He felt like there was a path before him. Like he was standing at a place where the road split, where he had to take one route or the other and whichever he did, whatever way he went, he would never be able to return to that junction and change his mind. It was torturous, looking from one to the other, staring at the haze they disappeared into, not knowing what might be at the end of either of them. Knowing that if he didn't decide, that sooner or later one or both would vanish and all opportunity would be gone.

He could not be expected to understand, being only six days old, that this was what it meant to be human.

And sitting there behind the pillar, unable to decide or know why he had to, teeth grit and hands tugging at his shins, was when he heard the sound. A twist and a warp like metal bending, a thick pop and then a retreat. A feeling like goosebumps crawling across his arms.

"Ugh, man. What happened to this place?"

The voice came so suddenly that he nearly jumped and cried out, but he'd been wrapped up in himself so tightly that he didn't move or make a sound. There had been no footsteps, no sound of approach, but the voice came from behind him in rough and easy tones, and as the skin prickled on the back of his neck he knew there was more than one.

"I guess hordes of crawling darkness will do that, right?" The second voice was higher, more amused with itself, almost melodic. It chuckled.

The first voice joined in the laugh, more of a rough guffaw. "Well, whatever. Where's the new guy?"

"Um... wait, wait." The second voice was followed by a shuffle, rustle of fabric and then the crackle of paper. "'Hollow Bastion,' that's what it says. And these are the coordinates the Superior wrote down. Which is right here." Tap of a foot against the floor. "I think. Isn't it?"

Sound of shrugging fabric, followed by the first voice. "Looks right to me."

Behind the pillar, he tensed and waited. The people who had appeared suddenly, after that strange noise--they weren't like the Castle's people. In fact, he could almost feel it when he licked his lips and tasted the air... they were Wrong.

They were Wrong in the same way that _he_ was Wrong.

"So... I guess we look for him?"

The first voice made a noise of derision. "What, do we wander around calling, 'Here, nobody nobody nobody!' This place is huge."

Silence for a moment, then the second voice coughed a laugh. "Oh, I get it! Like a kitty."

The first voice sighed in resignation. "Yes, Demyx, like a kitty." The first voice paused, and its owner took a few steps, and when it spoke again it was slightly closer. He curled up tighter around himself. "Well, you know, the Superior is pretty accurate. He's probably around here somewhere. Come on."

For a moment, in the ballroom beyond the pillar, there were a series of strange noises. First a shuffling, and then some rapid whispers, and the sound of fabric moving as though wide gestures were being made. And then the second voice rose with an, "Ooooooh, okay," of agreement, and then the sound of footsteps leading away.

He only relaxed when it had been silent for several minutes and he was pretty sure the two voices had left and gone to find whoever it was they were looking for. He wondered who it was. Who _they_ were. What the hell they had been talking about. He rubbed a hand through the spikes against his forehead.

"S'up, kid?"

And he had never, _ever_ jumped that high in his (very brief) life.

Dimly, he was aware that his back was against the wall and he was pressing against it quite insistently, as though if he did so hard enough he would sink into the stone and escape. And his hand was at his side again, reaching and clasping at the air and he knew, he _knew_ that something was supposed to be there for him to curl his fingers around. Something he could use to defend himself.

"Hey, hey!" The figure in black at his side waved its hands in supplication, reaching up to push back the deep hood hiding its face. "Cool it. We're not gonna hurt you."

He had time to take in the eyepatch, the lined face and the streaks of gray hair before the second voice popped up at his side.

"Hi!" The second person's hood was already drawn back, and the guy had the most _insane_ hair he had ever seen (which was admittedly not saying much), but was grinning and waving one hand. "Oh man, Xig, he's _tiny_."

He made a soft sound in his throat, something between fear and defeat, looking back and forth between the two and noting that they were each taking up all the space between the pillar and the wall, effectively locking him in.

In his stomach, the fear snapped at him, but stayed put.

"Anyhow," the one with the crazy hair said, still grinning as though this would make him seem harmless, "hi there, I'm Demyx. And that guy is Xigbar." He made a gesture towards the one with the eyepatch, who nodded and held out a hand as though to shake, which went ignored. "So... what's your name?"

He swallowed, rubbing sweaty palms against the wall behind him. His name was-- "I..."

But Demyx was already waving this away. "That's okay, never mind. No one remembers at first."

He looked back and forth between them, noting the relaxed postures and friendly expressions, like they didn't expect him to be able to escape, even if he wanted to. He closed his gaping mouth and scowled. His name was-- "What do you want?"

Xigbar shrugged, so he looked at him first. "We came to pick you up."

"Took six days to find you," Demyx added, nodding. "Sorry about the wait, but the Superior--"

"Don't worry about that." Xigbar waved a hand in dismissal, gesturing more to Demyx, who looked confused for a moment before his eyes widened and he nodded in understanding. "They'll explain everything later. What's important is, we have food."

"You're hungry, right? That's how we found you back here."

"And you probably don't want to stay in this funky old place forever, right?"

His stomach chose this moment to growl and betray him.

He looked back and forth again. These two were Wrong, he knew that. He could feel it, almost like a kinship although the fear in his gut still told him to be wary. They didn't expect him to know his name. They didn't expect him to understand anything but maybe they could explain it later.

But most importantly, they had known, somehow, that he was going to be here.

"Do you..." He turned again from one to the other, noting again how casual they were and he thought, cautiously, that maybe they really _were_ just being friendly. "Do either of you know... _Why_?"

"Oh, that's a tough one." Xigbar intoned, but he nodded as though he knew what the question meant.

Demyx tapped his chin. "Well, I think some of us might have an idea. But that's better than nothing, right?"

He swallowed hard and moved a little bit away from the wall. He opened his mouth. His name was-- "My name is..." he said slowly, staring down at his right hand, still curled around the air that wouldn't solidify and turn to metal against his palm. "S--"

His mouth tried to form around the word, but it wouldn't come.

"Don't worry about it, kid."

"It'll come to you sooner or later." Demyx grinned again and motioned for him to follow him out from behind the pillar. That sound was forming again, the slow warp and when he stepped out into the ballroom there was a ring of darkness standing free in the middle, ink-black depths swirling away into nothing.

"Through there?"

Demyx nodded cheerfully. "Yeah, it's totally creepy at first, but you get used to it." He held out one arm, almost dramatically, gesturing for him to go first.

He swallowed and squared his shoulders, and thought that this was the closest he might ever get to Why. He saw the paths he had been offered and knew that he could probably say no, that he could probably leave and go find the Castle's people and see if they knew anything about Why.

He didn't think they would. They still had their hearts, and the two men standing behind him--they didn't.

He stepped forward into the darkness, and he thought for the second he was within it and wrapped in its embrace, that he felt it caress his cheek and whisper in his ear.

_Welcome home, Roxas._

But he couldn't be sure.


	2. 2

**Standard Disclaimer:** I do not own Kingdom Hearts. I do, however, own a Roxas action figure, which brandishes ice cream at me regularly.

**Warnings:** Language, violence, boy/boy situations (up to and including sex), spoilers for KH, KH2 and probably CoM as well.

**Pairings:** Axel/Roxas, with some Riku/Roxas that is really Riku/Sora, and also some actual Riku/Sora. Par for the course.

**Casey would like you to note:** I think this might be substantial proof that Roxas really is my favorite character. Watch as I cease attempting to deny it.

I'm aware that some of this doesn't line up with canon, particularly the parts revealed by Final Mix. I made this discovery after the fic was in progress and I already had the whole thing worked out. It concerned me for a while, but ultimately I decided to stick with the story as I originally envisioned it. Changing it would have compromised the integrity of the story, and that should become clear once you've read it. It just wouldn't have been the same. So—please forgive my willful ignorance.

* * *

**2.**

The new Castle was not like the old Castle. The old Castle was grand and sweeping and multicolored and defined by twisting pipes and rolling stairways and platforms that led to nowhere. The new Castle was white and gray and glass and nowhere near as large, and it tapered into arches and dipped into stone and glowed with electric light.

He wasn't sure which he preferred. He wasn't sure, actually, that he cared for castles very much at all.

A room was assigned to him. It was small and white and had a small, white bed and a small grayish desk and a tall glass window that looked out over halfhearted rainclouds and the jagged black sprawl of a city that glowed in shades of neon. He spent most of the first day at the new Castle observing this city, because Demyx, after feeding him, had left him in the room and told him to hang tight while he went to check on something. He'd come back much later, and frowned and turned the lights on, and apologized over and over for leaving him alone for so long.

Demyx told him to just take it easy for a while. Demyx told him to be patient and focus on getting his feet under him. Demyx smiled a little too tightly and left a little too quickly and told him he could leave his room and explore the Castle if he was bored. But he wasn't to open any doors aside from his own--his own identifiable by the etched black numeral on the front--and he wasn't to go into the city. Ever. The Heartless there, Demyx explained, wouldn't listen to him.

So he left his small, white room and wandered through the new Castle in much the same way he wandered through the old one.

He was given clothes to wear, and at first he had refused. He hugged the blue and yellow clothes he'd found in the sunlit room of the old Castle against himself and glared at the black and gray and white of the clothes he was given to wear and just. Refused. Until one morning he woke and pressed the shirt against his nose and realized that it was starting to smell more like himself than the familiar warm scent that triggered his memory with scraps of images and sounds that told him nothing.

He took the blue and yellow clothes off, then, and wrapped them in brown paper and hid them under the foot of his mattress. He kept the shoes, though, because when he looked down and saw them on his feet he felt like he was connected to something. What, he wasn't sure. Maybe they just connected him to the ground beneath him--but he kept them, anyway.

Sometimes when he wandered he would see other people in black. Sometimes when he approached one of these people they would throw back the hood and it would be Xigbar, or a blond man who always seemed amused by his presence, or the hood would remain and cold eyes would glare at him until he passed. There weren't many of them--at least, it didn't seem like there were many, and he wondered why Demyx had made it sound like there was a large group and which of the people in black was the Superior person he kept mentioning.

He wondered just what the hell they were all doing here, in a colorless castle in black hoods with their common Wrongness towering above a city full of Heartless. He wondered but he didn't know how far the universe went beyond this part of it, and the part the old Castle had inhabited, so he couldn't form an idea as to why. And Why just kept growing larger as the days passed, growing bloated and sick like the huge balloon-shaped Heartless that looked like they would burst into a disgusting mess if you took a needle to them.

Sometimes when he wandered he would find these _things_, and they weren't like the Heartless _things_. They were gray and white and black just like the Castle and the people in it and the clothes he was wearing and his room. And they would speak, in a manner, at least, and he could understand them with relative ease. They were demure and respectful and just as Wrong as everything else in the castle--they called him 'master' or 'my lord' and asked if he was well, if he needed or wanted anything.

Sometimes he would say "No," and they would bow and slither along their way to continue doing whatever it was that they did. Sometimes he would ask for food and they would bring him a dinner plate or a dish of sweets or whatever else he wanted at the time. Sometimes he told them he needed fresh clothes and three of them would sweep through his colorless little room and collect all the laundry and strip the bedclothes, before three more dove inside and replaced it all.

He learned to assure, at times like this, that he had his arms wrapped securely around his brown paper package of blue and yellow clothing.

One day, he told one of the _things_ that he wanted a bookcase. The _thing_ nodded and disappeared into the depths of the Castle, and when he returned to his room that evening there was a bookcase standing empty beside his desk. He had nothing to put on it, however, so he just looked at it for a moment before nodding to himself and changing for bed.

One day he told one of the _things_ that he wanted something yellow in the shape of a star.

The _thing_ had looked perplexed for a moment--although it had no proper face to look perplexed with, so perhaps it had just _felt_ perplexed--then nodded and bowed and slithered away. He didn't see it again until almost two days later, when it arrived at his room carrying a yellow paper lantern, star-shaped with smaller stars cut in the surface so the light could shine through. The _thing_ hung it from his ceiling, and at night he would turn it on and a soft golden glow would fill his small, white room, and he would stare at it from his bed until his vision blurred and he fell asleep to watch his heartbeat dreams flash fragments of memory in pulses across his mind's eye.

* * *

One morning, he woke up and heard a poorly-concealed conversation being carried in the hallway outside his room. He padded quietly across the floor, and opened his door just enough to hear what was being said.

"--just _explain_ why he hasn't come back yet," Demyx was saying through grit teeth in a hushed voice. "He was supposed to be back _weeks_ ago. _He_ was supposed to go to Hollow Bastion but he begged it off on me and Xig and now--"

"I fail to see how this is my problem." The second voice was curt and clipped and female, and despite the curtness and clipped-ness, it was coyly amused.

"Okay, look," Demyx said, and his voice was tired and a little desperate now. "There's a kid behind that door right there. A _kid_, Larxene, and he is _supposed_ to be Axel's trainee. _Supposed_ to be, not as in 'we decided to pawn it off on him' but as in 'the Superior said so'. _That_ kind of 'supposed to be'. Okay?"

"Still not seeing how this is my problem," the female voice reiterated with even more amusement, now. He chanced a peek through the crack of his door, taking in Demyx, back to him and gesturing widely with his arms, Xigbar at his side, and both of them facing a small, sprightly woman with sleek blond hair, two locks dangling artfully back from her face. He thought she looked strangely like a cockroach.

"It's not your problem," Xigbar grumbled, folding his arms and coming to Demyx's defense, "but you can come and go from Oblivion and we can't. So when you go back just kick Axel's scrawny white ass and tell him to get back here and do his job. We're not babysitters and the kid's gonna start demanding answers to stuff we're not supposed to be handling."

The woman had her head tilted to the side, mouth open like she was going to offer them a scathing response to that request, but then her eyes traveled to the side and stopped right at his door, at the crack it was open, and subsequently, landed on _him_.

"That him?" her voice asked, and he jerked back from the door, pushing to slam it closed but a foot got in the way, and a hand pushed it back open, and the woman tugged him out into the hall by the wrist and examined him along the length of his arm.

After an extended silence--during which he stared up at her and noted how her eyes seemed to spark and the air around her has a crackling quality to it, then glanced behind her at the two men who'd collected him from his place of birth--she muttered, "Holy _fuck_," and let him go. She looked back at the two with something like accusation. "Even Zexion wasn't that young."

Demyx kind of shrugged. Xigbar looked to one side, then back abruptly and stalked over to clap him on the back. "C'm on, kid. How about some breakfast?"

"Who's Axel?"

The three of them just paused in the hallway at his question, and the the woman--Demyx had called her Larxene, he remembered--said, "You'll meet him soon."

That was the last time he saw her, for a while.

* * *

Sometime around the end of the second week he had explored the Castle in its entirety. It wasn't that difficult, as it wasn't as large as the old castle had been, and if he got lost all he had to do was find one of the _things_, who would either escort him back to familiar territory or go fetch one of the people in black to collect him.

He'd found the very top, a spread of white under a wash of stars, and had stared up into the sky for long enough that he forgot he'd moved to lie on his back, and he felt like he was lying on something softer than stone, and he felt like someone, or maybe more than one someone, was there with him--and when he tried to drag that memory close enough to see it shattered and left him cold and very much alone at the topmost balcony of a castle with no color and fake lights.

The moon, when it rose, was the shape of a heart, and it made him feel sick.

* * *

Everything was too gray, and there was a restlessness in his bones that made him pace back and forth in his own room, from the white door to the gray window, and with each rotation his muscles tightened. He was tired of walking through the Castle, he was tired of asking the _things_ to fetch him stupid and useless items, he was tired of sitting in a random hallway and holding his hand in the air in front of him, and curling his fist and trying to call up the image of what should have been there. His life, his weapon, his constant companion, the energy that pulsed and sparkled at his side, ready and waiting to be called into physical form. All it took was a reach of the hand and a thought.

But no matter how he tried, it wouldn't appear.

The next round he paced, he kicked at the door, and then the wall under the window.

Weeks, he'd been here, and he still didn't know Why. He was further from Why than he had been at the old Castle, further from Why than he had been when the universe convulsed and spat him out fully-formed in that cold room with the swirling dark door. And Why was just growing bigger and swelling and reddening and soon it would explode in a mass of green pus and yellow liquid and drain away into an infected wound. Soon it would blacken and fester and eat him alive.

The next round, he punched the door, and then stopped by the window.

He picked up the metal desk chair and brought it smashing down onto the flimsy gray desk. He smashed it again and again until the pathetic excuse for furniture was in fragments.

When that was done, he turned on the bookcase and reduced it to splinters. And when that was done, he turned and flung the chair at the window, watching the glass burst into shards of half-light and watching the chair tumble over itself and fall into the haze of gray outside. He stood frozen in place with the ruins of his room scattered around him like the fragments of memory in his head. Stood and sucked in breath after breath and felt blood rushing hot through his body despite the lack of pulse and lack of an organ to propel it. Stood with his teeth clenched and his fists clenched and wanted to scream like he had when he was born.

This is how he met Axel.

Because somewhere behind him someone breathed the words "Holy _shit_," and he spun around, scattering the bits of wood and glass under his feet, and someone was standing in his doorway, one elbow on the frame for support.

_Someone_ was tall and thin and angular, with hair the color of tomatoes that frizzed and stood on end like the hackles of something that was living in its own right. His eyes were green and wide and punctuated by long, thin diamonds of black on his cheeks, and he had this look--kind of like he'd just seen his own death approaching, and was pretty sure it wasn't his time yet, but was at a loss for what to say in defense of this.

Demyx was somewhere behind him, hands up defensively in front of his chest, and for a moment no one said a word.

Finally, he unclenched his fists and unclenched his teeth and said, "I wanted to break something."

* * *

"Sorry it took so long," was the first thing Axel said to him for a while after that, when they were climbing a staircase to somewhere higher in the Castle, bypassing _things_ and doorways and some other people in black that Axel would wave to in an abbreviated greeting.

"What?" he asked, and scurried through a door Axel pushed open and had to all but run to keep pace with him.

"Me getting here. I was busy." And that was all the explanation he ever got, because when he looked up to grumble something in response, Axel's face was tight and expressionless and focused intently on the path ahead of him, and he decided to say nothing instead.

When they stopped, it was on a balcony that jutted out from the castle and hovered over the city below, thin railings surrounding it to stand between them and the free and empty air beyond. The rain was light, almost a mist, and Axel dropped to sit on the stones against the wall without preamble, motioning for him to do the same at his side.

"It's like this, kid," Axel said to the rain and the railing and the stone and anything aside from _him_, hands folded over his knees and twisting around each other, "there's no way to sugar-coat it. You're here because the person you used to be is dead."

Axel paused and let the silence digest this for a while. Paused while the boy at his side looked down at his shoes and felt connected to something and wondered. "The person you were--he lost his heart, somehow. It was taken or devoured or given up or--who the hell knows, and there's no telling where it is now or if it can ever be recovered. However it happened, that person--he's a Heartless now. You--you're the bit of him that was left behind. His body and mind and whatever's still there when the heart isn't anymore. The leftover nothing. That's how it is."

He listened to this, wrapped his arms around his own shoulders and leaned forward against his knees and watched small round drops of rain land on his toes, spread into little circles and then shrink away and vanish. "Why did you bring me up here to tell me this?"

Axel stared at the railing surrounding the balcony and said nothing.

"You never asked for my name."

"No."

He thought about yellow stars, first. He thought about the flashes in his memory and the Wrongness of his reflection in the mirror. He thought about the word the man with the scar on his face was going to say and wished, for the first time (and never, ever the last) that he had stayed at the old Castle and talked to the people there.

He thought about the weapon that was supposed to be in his hands and he thought about the horizon and the things that existed beyond it. He thought about Axel, who must have been told the same thing sometime before, and all the people he might have told this to before, and all the people in black who had all been told the same thing before.

He said, "I'm not going to jump," and looked up from his shoes to the profile of the man beside him--boy, really, Axel couldn't be much older than himself, physically speaking. Memorizing it quickly. "I think," he said slowly, waiting for green eyes to turn to the side and take him in, "that there must be a reason."

The world remained just like that for a moment, the pat-pat sound of raindrops on stone the only fluctuation, and then all the air seemed to flow out of Axel's body and he slumped forward against his knees.

When Axel righted himself, there was something approaching a smile on his face, and he reached over to nudge his shoulder. "Good kid. What do I call you?"

"Dunno," he said, then as an afterthought, "starts with 'S'."

"No, not that--you can tell me that later, if you want. When you remember, and I'll tell you mine." Axel's almost-smile grew to a full-out grin, and he elbowed him in the ribs. His face and his voice and his movements had all lost the tightness from moments before, dissolving into playfulness now that the crawling fear of watching the empty shell of a boy break before his eyes had passed.

He understood fear, if very little otherwise.

After another smaller, calmer breath of silence Axel reached over to tug him to his feet. "What does the darkness call you?"

He frowned, and thought, and remembered weeks ago, stepping through the swirling portal Demyx called up, whispered caresses and--

_Welcome home--_

"Roxas," he said, and the name sounded Wrong in the same way that he and Axel and the people in black and the _things_ and the Castle and everything around him was Wrong.

He knew, though, in the way that he knew some things for no reason, that the name belonged to him.

"Roxas," Axel repeated, and shoved a hand under his nose. He shook it cautiously. "Axel. I'm here to train you, so no more slacking off and destroying your furniture, okay?"

Something tugged the corner of his mouth up, and he nodded. "Yeah, okay."

* * *

When he returned to his room that evening, the broken glass and wood had been cleared away and the broken window and furniture had been replaced. He frowned at the duplicate copies of desk and bookcase and chair and the eerie quality of their presence, like his temper tantrum that morning had never happened. He tried to shrug it off, but it clung to him anyway, the idea that everything in the Castle really was made of nothing.

He checked to make sure his brown paper package was still under the foot of his mattress. He checked to make sure his star lantern still worked, then he climbed into bed and watched the gold spots the lantern threw on his walls until he fell asleep.

He dreamed of an endless expanse of darkness. He could see the edges of his heartbeat memories, flickering away on either side of him, but they were like tiny flashes of light too distant to sense. He floated there, and it was quiet and peaceful, it was comforting, and he was secure in the knowledge that it was all over, now. That he would just hang here in the darkness for eternity and the universe would go on without him.

He wondered if that was how it had felt, when he died the first time, but then he heard the Voice.

The Voice was louder than anything he had ever heard, but it wasn't a sound. It was like a vibration that shuddered through him, rattled his body and shook through his mind and echoed hollowly in the empty space in his chest. It tugged at him and pulled him forward, it made the darkness seethe around him in irritation, clinging to him in retaliation.

He choked on the dim remains of sadness in his throat, because he didn't want the darkness. He wanted the Voice, he wanted to find it and clutch it tight until he exploded like a star, and all the darkness drained away. But he was sinking further, long tendrils wrapping around and caressing and whispering and lulling him back into the false comfort, the desire to just sleep and forget about anything else.

The Voice said: _Giving up already? Come on, Sora, I thought you were stronger than that._

It was the first thing that ever felt Right.

He woke up shaking and sweating and clutching his sheets so tightly he thought his hands might break open and bleed. He sat in his bed in the dark with specks of false starlight scattered across him and breathed in long shuddering gasps, tucking his arms around himself until his body stopped trembling. His name was--

_Sora_.

His name was _Sora_.

"Sora," he murmured to himself and the air in front of him and his room and the golden light, and the shadows in the corners seemed to shrink at the sound. And he repeated it because he was afraid if he didn't he would forget again. "Sora."

_Sora. Sora. Sora._

He shoved himself out of bed and over to the flimsy gray desk and tore frantically through the drawers, fingers finally closing around a pen and a sheet of paper. And still trembling and sweating and licking the salt away from his lips, he sat in the golden light of his false star and wrote the name out, over and over again. Over and over again until it filled every last bit of space on the entire paper.

_Sora Sora Sora SoraSoraSoraSoraSora--_

And when that was done, he turned the paper over and did the same on the back.

When there was no more space to write his name down, he leaned back in the chair and caught his breath. His lungs were still heaving and body still shaking like he'd run up and down every staircase in the Castle in his sleep. But even so--

The fifth emotion he felt made something bubble in his core, made the corners of his mouth curl up until his eyes crinkled, and then he leaned over the desk and laughed, a bright sound in the sullen and colorless room, a sound that belonged to the golden light and the Voice and the syllables of his name.

He laughed until his stomach ached and his head spun, and he fell asleep there on his folded arms, the paper with his name written a thousand times secure under his palm. And even in his sleep his mouth curved into a smile.

His name was Sora.

* * *

In the morning he slipped the paper into the brown package he kept under his mattress, nestling it in with the blue and yellow clothes and smoothing all of them carefully with one hand before replacing the package in its hiding place.

He was pulling his shirt on when a loud knock sounded on his door and Axel shoved it open. "Rise and shine Ro--oh, you're up." Axel noted this somberly, leaning back against the doorframe and stifling a yawn, scratching a hand back through his hair.

He looked over dubiously and tugged his shirt the rest of the way down. "Apparently, I'm not the one who needs to shine."

Axel pulled a face--teeth bared like fangs in disgust, presumably at the hour. "Whatever. Breakfast. Make it fast so we can get going."

"Going where?"

"Field trip," Axel announced, waving one hand at the corridor beyond, which really didn't explain anything. "Dress warm."

* * *

"You call that dressing warm?"

He stuffed his hands into his pockets and ignored Axel poking at the long-sleeved gray shirt he'd put on under the white tee. "Yes."

Axel rolled his eyes and walked a little faster. "Teenagers," he uttered like an oath, then paused. "Said the pot to the kettle."

He chuckled softly under his breath and hurried to keep pace, Axel turning to the side enough to look down his shoulder at him.

"Someone's in a good mood today."

He thought about his dream and the Voice and his name on the paper, his name rolling around in his mind and softly tinting the corners of his thoughts with light. He thought about telling Axel. Wondered if telling someone else and having it repeated back to him would make it more Right.

He thought about it, but decided: not quite yet.

In an adjoining corridor one of the _things _appeared at his elbow and brought them both to a halt. He was used to the routine by now and stopped immediately, turning to its bizarre excuse for a face and ignored Axel as he looked between the two in growing confusion.

_Good morning, my lord._

"Morning."

_Are you well today?_

"Fine, thanks."

_Do your chambers need attention?_

"No, not today."

_Where will you be taking lunch?_

"I don't know, I'll be out for a while, I think."

_Then we await further orders._ The _thing_ bowed demurely. _Good day to you, my lord._

When it had stalked and slithered away, Axel finally closed his mouth and opened it to speak, one finger raised and hovering in the air. "Wait, wait. Okay. The Dusks actually _listen_ to you?" He paused and waited for some kind of response until the boy before him shrugged in a delayed and unhelpful gesture. "The Dusks don't listen to _anyone_. They just hang around and annoy people."

He shrugged a little again, looking down the hall to where the _thing_ had disappeared. "They've always been like that."

"Huh." Axel remained posed there for a moment, then shook his head and clapped him on the back. "Our Thirteen. Well, eventually. Come on."

He was drug down the hall by the elbow, then, nearly to the front gates and the end of the boundary line Demyx had laid out for him the day he arrived. "What are you talking about?"

"I'll get to that. We'll discuss the Organization today." Axel let him go at the gates and continued walking, striding through them without a care for what lay beyond. "But first, we're going to the city." He stopped abruptly, turning when he realized his charge was no longer following.

On the other side of the gate, he curled his fingers and tugged the sleeves of his shirt over his palms.

"Come on." Axel said it gently, made a little motion with his hand, and waited until he stepped forward and hurried after.

* * *

The single, tiny black Heartless regarded him with limpid golden eyes, crouched over the rain-damp street and hovering there as though unsure what to do about this intruder. He frowned at it and looked up to where Axel was perched on a low wall. "What am I supposed to do now?"

"Fight it," Axel replied, as though it were obvious, resting his chin in one hand.

"With _what_?"

"I don't know, the weapon's different for everyone." Axel smirked lightly in something like encouragement, but it might have just been amusement. "Whatever it is, I suggest you do something soon. Shadow scratches sting like hell. Trust me."

He turned his attention downward again just in time to see the little black thing decide it wanted to fight--just in time to see it spring forward and just in time to dodge out of the way.

"See, you're fine. Just focus and listen to what I have to say."

"Axel--" he started, but was interrupted by the Shadow launching another attack and having to fling it away with one arm.

"Focus, Roxas." He chuckled lightly from his perch. "One little Shadow isn't going to kill you."

He rubbed sweat away from his forehead absently, bending his knees into a crouch and waiting for the little black thing to spring into attack again. There was a hum of anticipation running through him, but it wasn't quite complete--didn't know quite what to do, but both it and the unsubstantiated knowledge in his head told him the same thing: he couldn't defeat a Heartless barehanded.

"The Organization," Axel said above him, "is a collection of Nobodies. That's what we are, or what we're called, anyway. The Dusks and the other funky looking things crawling around the castle--they're Nobodies, too, but the people they used to be didn't have strong enough hearts to keep them in human form. I hope you're following me, kid, cause I'm not gonna repeat myself."

He didn't have time to respond, but Axel didn't seem to expect him to. He dodged another swipe of the Shadow's claws and spun across the ground on instinct alone, landing a kick across its soft body that sent it flying away. He straightened and panted and wiped sweat away again, waiting for it to right itself and close the distance between them.

"Ooo, nice one." Axel clapped his hands together briefly in approval. "Every Nobody born ends up at the Organization one way or another. Either we find them, like we did with you, or they just end up here on their own. The Superior--who, by the way, has this annoying tendency to come up with dramatic explanations for everything, you'll see when you meet him--says this is because we share a common purpose."

He took the initiative this time, leaping forward to tackle the little Heartless and fling it against a wall, momentarily stunning it. Its claw caught the edge of his wrist and he hissed, shaking his hand a little as though to rid himself of the feeling. "And that is?"

Axel chuckled again, meeting his eyes for the moment he dared to ignore the tiny Heartless and look up at his instructor.

"Should be obvious by now, Roxas."

He nudged the Shadow with his toe and it shook itself, springing away from him to regroup. He stared down at the shoe on his foot for a moment before responding. "We want our hearts back."

"Good kid. Watch yourself."

He jerked as the Shadow came at him from the side, spinning into the attack to avoid the brunt of it but the creature's claws dug into his arm, raking across it and leaving three searing lines of pain behind. He gasped, stumbling backwards and clutching at his arm, hissing as the sting burned deeper into his nerves and wetness spread across his palm.

"Told you it stung," Axel said behind him, and it sounded like he was trying to be unconcerned, but something in his voice had an edge. "You might want to find your weapon sometime in the near future."

He squeezed his eyes shut, teeth clenched against the pain. "I can't."

"Sure you can." Axel's voice was stretched by a smile. "You want to survive, don't you?"

"I've _tried_." He forced his eyes back open, forced himself to focus on the little black thing skittering across the pavement, hesitating on one side to see if its opponent was weakening. "It won't come to me."

"The Organization exists to reclaim the hearts of Nobodies," Axel said, resuming instruction without acknowledging the state of his pupil. "Either by locating the originals or creating new ones. To that end, the Superior has secured Kingdom Hearts to collect all the unclaimed hearts scattered across the worlds, and most of these just so happen to be lying snugly in the bellies of Heartless. So to _that_ end, a large portion of our job is to destroy Heartless. And if you have any intention of doing that, Thirteen, you have to find your weapon." His voice dropped and softened into something more encouraging. "Try again."

His arm throbbed. His hand curled around empty air and the Shadow pounced again. He barely threw it off, back and away across the stretch of street around him, and even so one claw caught him across the back, stinging in a line along his spine. He breathed in deeply, trying to find his center again, trying to tap into that hum across his nerves and muscles that _knew_.

"Concentrate, Roxas." Axel's voice was hard in his ears with an edge like fire. "You're better than this."

--_thought you were stronger than that_--

He flailed through the air with both hands, reaching and clutching and watching the Shadow's golden eyes bearing down on him, little round form scrambling across the ground in a line directly at him, and his mind flailed for the memory of what should have been there, what should have been in his hands and gleaming and ready to cut the Heartless down--

_Key_.

And when he moved, his entire body remembered. And when he stopped, the Shadow disintegrated into smoke before his eyes. And when he breathed, he could feel cold metal burning against his palms. Silver-white in his left hand, and sleek black in his right.

It was the second thing that had ever felt Right.

"Whoa, overkill." Axel was chuckling from his perch, clapping his hands together slowly before hopping down and strolling across the pavement to face him. "Seriously, though, giant keys? That's something else."

"They're called Keyblades," he said with a level of certainty that startled him, muscles pulsing with it and the kinetic memory singing through his nerves. They were part of him, an extension of his body, and he knew deep through to his bones how to move with them, how to swing and dodge and dance and rain destruction down on anything in his path. "They were mine before."

Axel stood and stared down at him for a long moment, smirk growing steadily wider before it broke into a full grin. "Wanna go find some more?"

He curled his fingers and felt the metal slide like silk in his hands, warming against his skin and so _Right_ there. So Right alongside the pulse of adrenaline and the taste of battle on his lips, and any pain he'd felt moments before dulled into nothing. "Yeah."

* * *

"Stand up straight," Demyx was saying, tugging on the shoulders of his shirt so it wouldn't lay crooked. "And don't talk too much, okay? Just listen to whatever he says and don't argue, 'cause you totally do not have high enough rank to argue with him. Yet. Okay?"

He frowned at the massive double-doors in front of him, and then looked up and frowned at Demyx, still fussing over him and the state of his clothes and his unruly hair. "Where's Axel?"

"Axel got called back to Oblivion last night." Xigbar plucked Demyx away from his fussing and nudged him in the shoulder until he stood still. "He'll be back soon. I'm going to the city later on if you want to tag along and get some more practice in."

"But _first_," Demyx insisted, working himself into a fluster again, "you have an audience with the Superior, so _don't slouch_." He made his point by turning the boy before him by the shoulders and poking him in the spine until he straightened.

Xigbar and Demyx pushed the doors open on either side, holding them until he stepped through and into the room beyond.

It was gigantic and circular and white, a cylinder reaching up and up until it disappeared into the artificial light that glowed somewhere at the top. Staggered around the walls were a dozen and one white thrones on massive pillars, shooting up to randomly different heights. It was as startlingly huge and behemoth as the massive doorway that lurked in his first memory, but this was a behemoth in blinding white, and stepping into it felt like tainting something artificially pure.

In the center of the room, one of the thrones had been lowered to the floor behind a massive white table, and sitting in it was a splotch of black and silver among white--a man with his hood thrown back, studying their approach from his seat that, even lowered, was still several feet above the floor.

The fear in the pit of his stomach coiled and tightened. He curled his hands into fists and ran his nails against his palms.

"Morning, Superior," Demyx announced easily, propelling him forward with one hand. "Special delivery, one itty-bitty blond Nobody for your inspection."

"I see that, Demyx," the man at the table replied in a tired sort of voice, like he was used to being greeted in this manner by this particular person. "Leave him here. I'll send for your reports later."

He was mostly aware of the men on either side of him nodding respectfully and turning to show themselves out, but he was focused far too much on the strain it took to look up and meet the pair of gold eyes studying him. He held like that, staring back without expression, until his muscles tightened and begged to fidget, and the man above him leaned back slightly.

"I've been hearing very good things about you," he said, sliding some papers aside on the table and setting a pen down atop the pile. "Very promising things."

He wasn't sure how he was supposed to respond to that, so he nodded just slightly and said nothing.

"Axel tells me that you show a rare instinct for fighting Heartless. Your Other--" and here the man's mouth turned up in a smile that the boy on the floor below disliked instantly, "whoever he was, must have been highly skilled. To be battle-bred at fourteen... it's no wonder he left a powerful Nobody behind."

He swallowed thickly and watched the man's hands fold around themselves on the table, breaking his stare with the yellow eyes still picking over him studiously.

"Are you comfortable here?"

He opened his mouth, not quite expecting to be questioned and his voice stuck for a moment. "I... guess so."

"Are you satisfied with Axel as your tutor?"

"Yes," he said, and realized he didn't even have to think about it.

The man lifted his eyebrows and clearly had noticed the haste in his response, gaze flickering over him again. "Good. We will meet again in a month, at which time I expect you to know how to open a portal, how to call the darkness, and how to call the Dusks, and be able to cross the city on your own. Then we will discuss your future here. Understood?"

He nodded slightly and swallowed again, fists curling tighter. "Yes." And although that seemed to be the end of the conversation, he had the distinct feeling that he hadn't been dismissed, and that the man above him had not finished his scrutiny.

"What is your name, boy?" the man asked suddenly, and there was a deep challenge in the way the words left his mouth.

On the floor, still stiff and clenched around himself, he didn't move. The fear curled tighter in his stomach but something else was roiling around it, a deep and abiding dislike for the man above him despite the knowledge that this man knew what he was doing, that this man would be the one to lead them out of the darkness.

That was what he'd been told, anyway, and he had no reason to disbelieve it--but he had no reason to like this man, either, with his gigantic throne and his silver hair and his yellow eyes and his stain of black against the white of the room. He squared his shoulders, he relaxed his fists, and he fixed a stare on the man with the intention of freezing him and his throne and the room and the world surrounding it.

He said, "My name is Sora."

The name echoed in jumps and skitters around the room, in and out and behind the columns and thrones, and when it had faded away into the nothing around them, the man began to laugh.

It was not necessarily cruel, or humorous. It was an expectant laugh mixed with hope and arrogance, weariness and self-deprecation. It lasted a moment, and then the man fell silent, and his eyes fell back to the floor.

"You are not Sora," the Superior said, very slowly and clearly and with a toneless quality that reminded him of the hollow space in his chest. "You _wer_e Sora. What you are now is a fragment. A splinter. A coin that fell through a hole in his pocket and was left behind. The sum of what you are now is and always will be less than what he was, and though you may have been part of him once, you are no longer. You must not call yourself by that name."

His throat went dry, and he tried to swallow but the muscles tightened down and he nearly choked. His own body, his own skin was collapsing in around him, crushing him, grinding him into dust, into nothing--

No, no, his name was _Sora_.

"My name is--"

"_Stop_."

The man's voice overrode the desperation of his own instantly, and on the floor, unmoving, he continued collapsing in on himself. His name was--

"You must understand, boy," the man said, and his voice was on the edge of soft. "You will destroy yourself with that identity."

But he craved it. He reached for it, he clawed for it, he ripped and tore and tried to drag it back to himself. His name was--

"You may go now."

The words rang in his ears after he had turned and left, after he had wandered back down the halls and ignored the Dusks that tried to attend to him. Hours after, when he was back in his room on his cold metal chair with the window open to the rain, lying against the sill and staring out into the blank gray of clouds and rain that never ended. The stretch that reached from him to the extent of everything.

You are not Sora. You are Nothing and Nobody.

The sixth emotion he felt--he thought it might have been called despair.

When Xibgar appeared at his door to take him to the city, he stood and paused in the center of the room. Remembered how the wood and glass had scattered around him the day he decided to break something.

He said, "My name is Roxas," and Xigbar chuckled and waved him outside.


	3. 3

**Standard Disclaimer:** I do not own Kingdom Hearts. I do, however, own a computer, a brain, and some fingers. This has worked out pretty well for me so far.

**Warnings:** Language, violence, boy/boy situations (up to and including sex), spoilers for KH, KH2 and probably CoM as well.

**Pairings:** Axel/Roxas, with some Riku/Roxas that is really Riku/Sora, and also some actual Riku/Sora. Par for the course.

**Casey would like you to note:** Like every other fic author on this little planet, I love reviews. They make me happy. Which is not to say that I'm going to sit here and guilt you into leaving one, but for those who choose to do so: thank you, and you are awesome.

I'm aware that some of this doesn't line up with canon, particularly the parts revealed by Final Mix. I made this discovery after the fic was in progress and I already had the whole thing worked out. It concerned me for a while, but ultimately I decided to stick with the story as I originally envisioned it. Changing it would have compromised the integrity of the story, and that should become clear once you've read it. It just wouldn't have been the same. So—please forgive my willful ignorance.

* * *

**3.**

The first time Roxas called down the light he hadn't meant to do it, and he surprised himself badly enough that he stumbled backwards and nearly ended up under a pile of Shadows.

It had just been a small thing, that first time. A strip of white that shot down out of nowhere and shattered one of the larger Heartless into black dust. It sparkled gold for a moment before it vanished and vibrated through the air, against the raindrops and over the cold metal in his hands.

The second time he tried it was desperation, really, because he'd lost himself in the battle, in fighting and dancing deeper into the city and further into the droves of Heartless and too far away from Axel and Demyx. He thought he heard a voice calling for him over the crackle of lightning in the sky, but he couldn't turn his focus from the press of crawling darkness closing in on him from all sides--Heartless wriggling and crawling over each other and cackling to themselves, that the little Nobody with the scary Keys had gotten too cocky, driven too far into their stronghold.

The second time he called down the light, it arched in a circle around him and shot out in a widening column, bright and gold on the edges from the wet ground under his feet to the tips of the stormclouds in the sky.

And when it faded and Demyx rounded the corner, the scores of Heartless were still rising in plumes of smoke and dust around him, the stink of them in the air.

And when Demyx asked, "What the _hell_ was that?" he barked something like a mirthless laugh in a "Huh," and the Keyblades slipped through his fingers, and he collapsed in a heap on the ground.

He learned to control himself after that.

* * *

Some days when he woke up in the morning Axel would appear at his door to drag him to breakfast, and then drag him off to an empty balcony or the city or sometimes a large room with Demyx or Xigbar or both, and he would practice. And most days when this happened, Axel would groan and admonish him.

"Seriously, Rox, if I take you in to the council room next month and you can call the light but not the darkness, Xemnas is gonna fry my ass in an infusion of white wine and tarragon and serve it for dinner. So if you happen to enjoy my company at all--_please_ try and focus."

Roxas could never quite explain what the problem was. It was like somewhere between the pull of energy from inside him and whatever he tried to form under his hands, the light and darkness would clash against each other and curl around and confuse each other, and he could never pull them straight enough to do what he wanted. And if he let them go to do what _they_ wanted, it was always too much for him or anyone around him to handle.

Some days, it felt like they were going to rip him in two. He wondered what would happen when someone who had already been ripped in two was ripped in two again.

Some days he would wake up and it seemed like the Castle was empty aside from himself and a few Dusks. Axel had to leave from time to time, he understood, and the others had to leave from time to time, and it all had something to do with the Organization and their business, and things he wasn't allowed to know about yet.

On those days, he was bored out of his mind. Sometimes he would sit at the window and stare at the rain-gray world outside and let his thoughts wander. He would think about the old Castle and wonder whether the people had left and gone to the town outside, like they had talked about. He wondered if the Other Female Voice still made that soup for dinner every night. He wondered if the man with the scar on his face would have really said his name the night he caught Roxas in the vents, wondered how the man knew his Other, wondered what the man could have told him if he'd stayed.

Sometimes he wished he had stayed.

Sometimes he thought about Axel and the other people in black, and wondered if they'd been born like him. If they were afraid when it happened, if they ever remembered who they were before.

Sometimes he would lock his door and close his window and pull the brown-wrapped package from under his mattress. Sometimes he would turn the lantern on and curl on his bed and hold the yellow shirt against his nose and breathe. Sometimes he was patient, waiting and quieting his mind so the memory would have room to float to the surface. Sometimes he ripped and clawed for it, beating himself against the blank gray nothing of his thoughts and grabbing for anything at all that would hold and stay.

Sometimes at night he would murmur his name to the darkness (_Sora_), and the darkness would laugh its cruel and sultry laugh, because he had chosen Roxas instead.

* * *

"We're going to try something different," Axel said, footsteps marking out a carefully measured distance between himself and Roxas. He'd picked a larger room indoors today, out of the rain, spread of blue-gray tile under their feet and pale artificial light glaring down around them from somewhere unknown far, far above. Axel turned on his heel when he reached the other side of it. "Pull out those giant key thingies of yours."

"Keyblades."

"That's what I said."

Roxas scowled, but Axel just chuckled and waved a hand dismissively.

But when he felt the familiar weight settling into his hands and held them up, he paused and murmured a soft, "Oh."

Sleek black and silver-white.

"Get it?" Axel leaned back against the wall and crossed his legs beneath his black coat, hands stuffed in his pockets. "Take your time."

It made sense, how to do it now. He tugged at the knots of light and darkness, pulling them up and easing them apart and they snarled and hissed unhappily but started to uncoil, started to slip through him and feed into the weapons in his hands. Light into the light key, dark into the dark.

And when the last tangle unfurled and the two slipped apart into their separate but equal channels, something snapped into place inside him with a force that made his body stagger and his breath hitch, and the image of the copper-pipe archway and its rippling dark door from his first memory slammed into his mind so hard that he could see the shadow of it before his eyes, double-exposed over the white and gray room and the black and red splash of Axel against the far wall.

And something split open.

_It was warm, and even with his eyes closed he could see the brightness of the sun red against the lids. It fell over his skin and heated it, a pleasant burn across his body, and his hands curled in the sand beneath him, letting it trickle between his fingers and clump in a ball under his palms._

_The ocean rushed in and out in great, long breaths, like the earth was snoring, a long, loud rumble and then a slow retreat. He snickered to himself at that thought and formulated it into __something more impressive to tell his friends later. The ocean is how the world snores._

_He stretched his arms and legs above him, reaching out with fingers and toes and when he opened his eyes, he laughed at his splayed hands and yellow sneakers and pretended he was falling into the sky._

Roxas blinked at the ceiling and didn't remember how he'd ended up on his back. He reached a hand up curiously, noting how his skin looked darker against the Castle's white.

Axel was knelt at his side, but he didn't notice until he spoke. "All right?"

"I got it," Roxas said, and curls of darkness twined around his fingers.

* * *

The second time he stepped into the white room with the thrones, he knew what would happen inside, and wasn't entirely sure why Axel felt the need to escort him unless it was some kind of formality. Knowing the Superior, although having only met him once, he guessed as much.

This time, when he walked through the double-doors into the artificial white behemoth of a meeting room, all but two of the thrones were occupied. He recognized some of them--Demyx and Xigbar, the blond man with the mustache and the woman. Some of them he didn't recognize, and some of them had their hoods pulled up so he couldn't see their faces.

Xemnas had his seat lowered to the floor again, but the table had been cleared away and he sat with his head propped on one hand and the other arm draped across the throne's armrest, and he looked like the vague imitation of a silver-crowned king sitting there. Roxas ignored the chatter that surrounded the other seats and the other pairs of eyes that were watching him and pulled his mouth into a tight line, set his gaze to chill and fixed it upon the Superior.

He stopped in the center of the room and it fell silent, and he waited again until his muscles tried to fidget, and he was pretty sure that Xemnas did that on purpose.

He was expecting the questions, this time, and he had answers for all of them.

"What is your name, boy?"

He said, "Roxas."

"Have you accomplished all that we discussed at our last meeting?"

He said, "I have."

"Do you intend to swear your loyalty to the Organization?"

He said, "Yes."

And when Axel tossed him the black hooded coat from where he was standing, a little behind and to the side, his hand was raised to catch it--and he didn't miss the acknowledging smirk on Axel's face.

And when he shrugged into the coat and pulled it to settle over his shoulders, Xemnas outlined the expectations he would be required to meet, that his orders would be absolute and he would carry them out swiftly and efficiently and without question, for the advancement of the Organization's greater plans--and from the corner of his eye he saw the woman he'd only met once nod a little and wink.

And when the zipper was pulled up to his collarbone and he dropped his arms to his sides, Xemnas nodded in an expression of finality and gestured to the last empty seat--and as he turned toward it he could see Demyx giving him a thumbs-up and Xigbar offering a small, two-fingered salute.

Roxas sat and listened that day while the group discussed the inner workings of the Organization, reported on their individual projects and agreed to future plans. He sat and studied each of them in turn and memorized their faces, their mannerisms and their roles within the group. He sat in his oversized chair and didn't feel small in it, but did feel the need to kick his legs in the air occasionally.

He watched and listened and occasionally he would lock eyes with Axel, who would smile conspiratorially and pull a face until he smiled back, just faintly.

If someone had bothered to ask him, which no one ever would, he wouldn't have been able to explain why he did it. Why he followed the expectations of these people and joined their ranks. He had just decided--because he had to do _something_, and this, at least, might be a vehicle to some answers. A method to figure out Why. That was all.

And when it was over the group parted and split off into smaller groups, or portaled away, and Axel found him to cuff his hair and replay something imitative in a mockingly pompous voice, and say that he would be gone for a day or two again--to that other castle the Organization had, the one they called Oblivion.

And Roxas nodded and thought nothing of it.

And that was the last time that all the members of Organization XIII were together, because two weeks later five of them were dead.

* * *

One week before that, however, Roxas found himself in the middle of the city in the dead of night, in a rainstorm that fell in drenching sheets, elbow firmly in Axel's hand and barely given enough time to finish off the Heartless that got in their way before being drug deeper into the neon gloom.

Axel said nothing, and that made the fear in his stomach curl in on itself. Axel had arrived in his room silently and shoved him into his coat silently and all but carried him out of the Castle silently, and the only other time Axel had lead him anywhere silently was the day they met, when Axel was preparing to tell his new trainee the truth about what they were.

So when they stopped when an alley ended at a wall and Axel crouched down, Roxas mirrored his position without question and pulled his hood down farther, spitting at the rain that had already soaked him through. He didn't understand why Axel threw his own hood off, but his eyes were too bright and Roxas focused instead on the way his spiked hair went limp under the falling water.

Until Axel grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him and hissed, "_Look at me!_"

So he did. Roxas looked and noted the way his teeth were clenched, the way his eyes sparked and the way he ignored the drops of rain sliding down his face.

"I have to tell you something important," Axel said, and the rain flung itself away from his lips when he spoke. "And you have to shut up and listen to me because I'm only going to say it once, and even that is enough to get me killed. Understand?"

Roxas clenched his jaw and swallowed before opening his mouth. "What?"

"Just listen, okay? Just listen and don't say anything and don't ask me any questions because I can't tell you anything else. Nothing at all but this."

"Then don't tell me!" Roxas hissed it and nearly shoved him away, because he didn't want to see that look anymore. "Just keep your mouth shut for once, Axel. Why the hell are you--"

"Because you deserve to know, dammit!"

Sheets of rain slammed into the ground and the buildings all around them, a roar of white noise and still he thought about the patters, the small drops that fell on the balcony nearly two months ago now. He felt Axel's fingers curling in against his arms and he nodded just a little.

He leaned a little closer, until his forehead was brushing against Roxas's hood.

Axel said, "_Sora is alive._"

The white noise filled his ears for a moment, and his mouth dropped open on its own and almost started talking on its own. "W-What?" The world had tilted slightly on its axis, because he felt himself slipping to one side of it, the beginning of a slide to the edge of everything. "How did you--I never told you my name!"

Axel just stared, and said nothing.

"How do you know?" He caught Axel by the shoulders when he leaned back and away, against the wall, gaze breaking and turning to one side. Curled his fingers in the soaked and rough fabric of his coat. "How do you know?"

Roxas was all but screaming over the rain, and he'd never been so desperate for anything in his life. His short, short and artificial not-life.

"Dammit Axel you have to tell me!" And his hood had slipped back from his face, back sopping wet onto his shoulders and the rain streamed over his skin. "Did you see him? Where is he?" He shook Axel, slammed him against the wall and slammed his fists into his shoulders. "TELL ME, PLEASE!"

When Axel said nothing, just focused on the pavement under their knees and the water trickling across it, he left--at a run, racing across the city through the rain and the Heartless and the neon and all the dark, dark places because that was all he knew.

Because Sora was alive, Sora was _alive_ but he didn't know where, or how to find him and his memories of sunlight and waves. Of the sky and yellow stars.

* * *

_He wasn't quite asleep, but his eyes were closed and he was wrapped in a blanket, small body cradled against a soft warmth. He was hot, too hot, sweat-damp at the temples and neck and down his back, and his nose was stuffy and his throat was sore and he'd never felt so miserable before, ever. He almost wanted to cry._

_He could hear a heartbeat under his ear, slow and rhythmic, and a woman's voice somewhere above his head humming a soft, soothing tune. He was curled against her as they rocked back and forth, and her arms wrapped gently around him and her fingers stroked his sweaty hair back from his forehead._

_He was safe here and he knew this with the unconditional certainty that only children could ever possess. He would always be safe here, and warm and she would make everything better again. She always made everything better, she would rock him to sleep and kiss his forehead and when he woke, there would be no cold and no fever and all the bad things would go away. And he drifted in the warmth and drifted into sleep with her voice murmuring in his ears, "It's okay, sweetheart, I'm here..."_

Roxas woke up to a play of golden stars across his ceiling and a lump in his throat that he couldn't swallow. He stared up instead and counted the points of light until it loosened and his body relaxed, and when he turned to the side Axel was sitting by his window. Slumped against the sill in his desk chair with one side open to the rain, red and shadow and dappled under the lantern's light.

"You were crying for your mom in your sleep," Axel murmured to the windowsill.

Roxas scowled and pushed himself up, sitting back against the headboard and pulling his blankets up enough to cover his hands. The air from outside was cold. "Bet you do it, too."

Axel made a noise, a kind of abbreviated huff mixed with a cough, and scratched one hand back through his hair. "Not like you sneak into my room to find out."

"You probably snore." _Like the ocean_.

"Got me pegged, Rox," he sighed, and it was like a kind of defeat.

Roxas shifted on his bed, pulling his knees up, and leaned his head back to watch the glow from the lantern crawl across his ceiling in the air currents from the window. "Why are you back already?"

"Project's over." Axel's voice was short and flat.

"So you don't have to go to Oblivion anymore?"

"Nope." He puffed at the end of the word like he wanted to throw it away from himself.

There was something very wrong with all of this--not wrong in the way that Nobodies and the places they inhabited were Wrong, but wrong in a normal, uncomfortable way that made the air tingle and the shadows pulse with a slow breath. It was all over Axel, in his lack of posture and at the edges of his voice and the gray outside the room that he was facing instead of Roxas.

He thought there was probably something he ought to be saying. Something he ought to be feeling, even, but no explanation rose up from his subconscious and the empty space where his heart should have been was still empty and still offered him nothing.

What he ended up saying was, "Cool."

The silence settled over the room like a blanket, muffled by the sound of rain from the window and the faint, faint breathing of the two occupants. Roxas shifted to lie back down, arm around his pillow and curled towards the edge of the bed, unconsciously towards where Axel was sitting and saying nothing and reaching out the window to catch the rain on his palm.

The bookshelf in the room was no longer empty. On the bottom shelf were the shoes from the corner room in the old Castle, scuffed with use but still where he could see them, where he could look down and remember that he was connected with the ground. The top shelf actually contained a book, something one of the Dusks had handed to him during his very first mission, so he'd kept it. Brought it back and placed it there, and looked at the leather spine that was so worn the gold title had faded away. He never opened it to see what was inside, but he decided he liked the book the way it was.

Someone had left a mirror on the second shelf one day. He'd turned it face down.

"Do you think," he said finally, and was surprised at how the sound of his voice didn't break the quiet, "that he knows I'm gone?"

Axel shifted in the chair and folded his arms under his chin, shrugging his shoulders against something--maybe the feel of Roxas watching. "I figure, maybe it's like..." He trailed off for a moment, and for a moment it seemed like he wouldn't continue. "Like when you leave to go on a trip, and you're already out the door and on your way, and you get this feeling like you've forgotten something. Only you check and check and you have everything you need, like your keys and your train ticket and your wallet. And you think back through what you packed, and you have three pairs of each item of clothing and your toothbrush and everything. And you think and think and think, and you're positive you didn't forget anything, but still... you can't help feeling like you're missing something important." Axel lifted his head finally, elbows against the sill and arms crossed and hands dangling over the edge. "I think that's probably how it feels."

Roxas didn't say anything for a minute, staring into the shadows under his desk just long enough that Axel would know that he had taken it seriously, then he hummed against his pillow and said, "You pulled that out of your ass."

Axel huffed at the rain in something close to a laugh, but the corners of his mouth turned up just enough. "Go back to sleep, Rox."

"Are you just... gonna stay here?"

The smirk twitched upwards just a little more. "Your room has a better view."

Roxas rolled over and pulled the covers up tighter under his chin. "Whatever."

He rolled back a while later just as his eyes were fluttering close to sleep, though, and that was the first time that night he saw green eyes watching him, sheen of gold under the lantern-light, and he fell asleep before he could do anything about it.

* * *

When he woke in the morning Axel was gone, and Demyx was beating an endless knock on his door.

The first thing he said when Roxas opened it, both hands in the air and eyes wide, was, "Axel's okay."

Roxas blinked at him. "Well, yeah, I just saw him last night."

"Oh." Demyx dropped his hands but his eyes were still wide and bright, and he started to say something, then shook his head and pushed past Roxas into his little white room, dropping immediately to sit at the desk chair, still turned mostly towards the window.

When Roxas didn't move for a minute, Demyx waved at the bed. "You should sit down."

Roxas didn't think this would really help his unexpected guest's nerves any, but nodded slowly and sat and watched the way Demyx's knee was jigging.

"Okay, so, the entire contingent from Castle Oblivion is dead. Except Axel." He made this announcement first and studied Roxas for a reaction, but when all he got was a mumbled "Oh" he proceeded to wind himself tighter, fingers knocking nervously between his knees, shoulders tightening and then slumping. "I mean--fuck, okay, I get it, it's like... _war_ or something. These things happen. But--" He seemed to be searching for an explanation, for a moment, still for a moment, then flung his arm out to one side. "You ever wish you could just _feel bad_ about something? Or--you do, but it's not enough?"

Roxas felt his eyebrows drawing together into a frown on his forehead before his lips even pulled down into one--there was nothing sad in his expression, nothing like it in the dull space of emotion reserved inside him, but-- "Yeah."

Demyx sighed and nodded and slumped forwards until his elbows were on his knees and his head was between them. "Did you know any of them?"

"Larxene. Sort of."

"Guess you can't now."

Demyx stayed like that for a while, but even slumped over his fingers and back still twitched with all that nervous energy he'd walked into the room with. Like something inside him was itching and scratching to get out, and why he'd decided to come to Roxas with this news and this level of tension and this tumble of words and half-formed ideas--there was no telling, and there was no answer for it even weeks and months afterwards. Roxas eventually came to the conclusion that either no one else was available or he'd just opened the first door he came to.

He had nothing to say to all of this, though, and he might have felt a little bit bad about that if nothing else. So he asked, "You know where Axel is?"

"He'll be cooped up with the Superior all day, probably."

But something made sense to Roxas, and later he would think that maybe Demyx had come to him because he knew that Roxas would want to get up and _move_.

He stood up abruptly enough that Demyx lifted his head, watched him grab the coat and gloves from where they were hanging at the foot of his bed. "Wanna go fight something?"

"Oh hell yes." Demyx said it in a sigh of relief, standing and pulling his hood up on instinct. "You have an assignment?"

"Land of Dragons." Roxas zipped up his coat and reached out to open a portal, and wondered why he felt like he'd grown up substantially during the course of a single conversation. Maybe it was an aftereffect of talking to Demyx. Maybe it was an aftereffect of knowing someone who died. "I'll take a late breakfast."

* * *

Axel didn't talk about Oblivion at all until weeks later, and even then he didn't actually talk about it. But then--Roxas was starting to figure out that most of what Axel said had nothing to do with the words that were coming out of his mouth.

What he said, speaking to the space of sky his head was tilted back to look at, propped backwards on his elbows against some stall in the middle of Agrabah on market day, shrill voices rising all around him but still in perfect pitch to be heard, was: "You know what's _really_ fucked up about this entire situation, Rox? A combined two hundred years of research among the top brass in this collective, and _no one_ knows what happens when a Nobody dies. You'd think there'd be more priority to that kind of question, what with death being the mother of all inevitability, right?"

What Roxas said, tugging on the collar of his coat because it was fucking _hot_ and black was rapidly failing as an all-occasion color, was: "I hadn't thought about it."

Later, he would wish he'd said something else, something that understood the conversation they weren't having a little better. Because Axel looked down at him briefly and there was something soft and fragile in the way he stared, and they never did talk about that again.

* * *

"So... these don't actually belong to anyone, do they?" Roxas pulled another figurine out of the box--there were at least fifty of them, he figured, each one small and smooth and vaguely humanoid and painted in such a fashion that bordered between disgustingly cute and completely hideous. He wasn't sure where exactly Xigbar had found them, if he was acting on vengeful impulse or if he'd just stumbled across them somewhere and decided they would provide ample entertainment on an off day.

And it happened to be an off day--one of those lousy ones where everyone else was still out on assignment, it was raining too hard to want to go out but not hard enough to justify staying in, and the prospect of wandering around in a gray fog until something happened just didn't appeal. Not that Roxas wouldn't have done it anyway, but Xigbar had appeared with a painfully heavy box and an ancient clay pigeon trap and broke that prospect.

And Xigbar was now standing with one foot perched on the railing surrounding the balcony he'd chosen in a fit of boredom, casting a look down at his not-completely-willing assistant with his one good eye, and resettling the weapon on his shoulder. "I hear talking, I don't hear loading."

Roxas really didn't have anything better to do, anyway.

"Pull!"

The first hideously ugly figurine sailed out over the city in a mockery of flight, only to be shot into a million pieces. Xigbar chuckled to himself. "All right, the machine works. It's on you, little man. Think of something that annoys you."

What Roxas thought of was: _Loading a clay pigeon trap that may very well explode in my face, in the rain, with a crazy old guy who never calls me by my name._ What he said, tactfully, was: "Mandatory all-day meetings."

"Good one. Pull!"

The representative ceramic figurine flew into the air and was summarily shot down, and the afternoon progressed in this general manner.

At least, up until the point Xigbar shot down the ex-wife he didn't remember but who had probably made off with the poolboy and a large sum of munny--all this in theory, of course, but he was running out of ideas--before shrugging his shoulders and turning his head back and saying, "Better make that two, just in case she exists."

But when Roxas looked up from loading the trap, Xigbar was poised with his scope up, peering down the line of his gun to the city below. "I don't remember inviting _these_ guys to the party."

* * *

Roxas had learned, very early on in his time as an official Organization member, that the best thing to do while on assignment with Xigbar was keep your head low and your mouth shut. He was an easygoing enough guy--or seemed that way when he was off-duty, at least--but in the darkness and neon reflection of the city, when he pulled up his hood and leveled his guns and began stalking purposefully through the dark, you didn't ask questions.

He followed Xigbar through the streets precisely two paces behind him, gloved hands curled in the air and ready to summon the Keyblades whenever necessary, silently providing rear-guard and silently dispatching any Heartless that appeared and didn't instantly fall to a piercing diamond bullet. He crouched when Xigbar crouched and melted into the wall when Xigbar edged towards a corner and wondered, silently, who or what the man had seen through his scope that was so unfamiliar it warranted this level of caution.

He'd thought, at first, that the Organization had no natural enemies. They didn't do much aside from run around slaying Heartless, at least on the surface--the Superior had his own designs on the whole process. At least, he'd thought that up until Oblivion fell.

And at that thought, he remembered what Axel has said about death, and wondered if the Castle was actually under attack. If he and Xigbar had inadvertently become the vanguard.

Xigbar paused in a deep shadow in an alley, then motioned with one hand for Roxas to move up next to him. He did so, and crouched, one gloved hand on the rough pavement below him for balance, ready to spring into action. Xigbar pointed to the mouth of another alley just perpendicular to their position, and as Roxas watched a shadow detached itself from that alley and hurried away down the road.

It wasn't a Heartless--he'd thought it was a Shadow, at first, at that size, but on second look it was actually a short, nimble figure in black, hood pulled over two ridiculously large ears.

"Someone's here to meddle," Xigbar hissed, so low Roxas had to piece the sentence together after mentally repeating the sounds a few times.

The figure disappeared into another shadow far down the road, and after several minutes of silence passed Roxas shifted to straighten, sure that Xigbar would want to pursue the intruder further. A hand moved back to tap his shoulder, though, a silent _don't move_ just as the same shadow in the alley mouth moved again, and another figure stepped out.

This one was definitely not a Heartless. In fact, it was dressed in an Organization coat--but Roxas knew, in the way that he knew certain things like his name and the Wrongness of the people and space around him, that the person under that coat was no Nobody. The person under that coat was whole and Right in the same way the people in the other worlds he visited on assignment were also whole and Right. The person under that coat was tinged with darkness in a way that the people in the other worlds weren't, though--and Xigbar must have known that when he raised one of his guns and focused the scope.

"Kiss your ass goodbye, brat," the man muttered, again so quiet Roxas could barely make it out, and fired.

He was never entirely sure of what happened next, but in the fraction of a second that followed there was a loud _clang_ in the wall above his head, Xigbar had dropped down several inches, and had still barely missed losing his ear to the weapon embedded in the brick they were leaning against. In the street beyond, the figure in black was crouched, Xigbar's diamond bullet in the ground just shy of one foot, hand still hovering in the air from flinging the... weapon. Roxas thought, initially, that it was some kind of sword.

Xigbar cursed, quite creatively.

Roxas reached up and pulled the sword-thing out of the wall. It _was_ a blade of some sort, dark and lacking reflection in the neon light and shaped like the outstretched wing of a bat. He turned it over in his hand but it vanished suddenly, leaving a few violet sparks behind and when he looked up, it had reappeared in the hand of the figure in black, still hovering in the street.

The figure raised one hand in a kind of irreverent half-salute, half-wave, then turned and ran off in the direction the smaller figure had gone.

Without really thinking about it, Roxas leaped from his place at Xigbar's side and ran after him.

It was instinct, he decided, feeling the thud of his feet against the ground, and he could hear Xigbar yelling somewhere behind him but all his attention was focused on the person in black, darting around a corner ahead and leading him away, further from the seclusion of the alleyways and closer to the city's bright center, into open air and drizzling rain.

He skidded to a halt when the street widened into a square, because the figure was standing at the other side, weapon raised and pointed at him. They were about the same size, Roxas noted while his fingers curled in the air--the other, though, he was a bit bigger.

The figure shifted one foot backwards into a stance. Roxas felt a grin creeping onto his lips in the shadows of his hood, and felt the weight of the Keyblades fall into his palms.

The figure faltered, blade wavering slightly.

Roxas scoffed under his breath, muttering, "Showoff," and wasn't entirely sure where that came from. Didn't matter, though, if the guy wasn't going to make the first move--

He darted forward himself, twin keys clashing hard against the other's strange sword.

They circled more warily after that, blades meeting a few more times before Roxas discovered that his second key wasn't going to avail him this time. The other boy--it must be a boy, he had decided, it felt the most appropriate--was too fast, too quick to block and dodge and slide just out of range.

He was good. Roxas licked sweat off his lips and shifted his grip on the blades, preparing for another charge.

The boy cocked his head suddenly, though, and jumped back, darting for the street and the edge of an alley. Just outside the shadows, though, he turned back, muttered something like a half-curious, half-amused, "Huh," like a chuckle, and vanished.

Roxas was about to give chase, again, but a hand grabbed the back of his coat and jerked him backwards and Xigbar hissed in his ear. "Just what the _fuck_ do you think you're doing, Thirteen?"

He jerked away, dismissing the Keyblades and shrugged his shoulders to straighten his coat, aiming a glare at the man--hood thrown back now and surveying the area with his one good eye.

"I wanted to fight him," Roxas said, and in his mind that was enough.


	4. 4

**Standard Disclaimer:** I do not own Kingdom Hearts. I do, however, own a computer, a brain, and some fingers. This has worked out pretty well for me so far.

**Warnings:** Language, violence, boy/boy situations (up to and including sex), spoilers for KH, KH2 and probably CoM as well.

**Pairings:** Axel/Roxas, with some Riku/Roxas that is really Riku/Sora, and also some actual Riku/Sora. Par for the course.

**Casey would like you to note:** Like every other fic author on this little planet, I love reviews. They make me happy. Which is not to say that I'm going to sit here and guilt you into leaving one, but for those who choose to do so: thank you, and you are awesome.

I'm aware that some of this doesn't line up with canon, particularly the parts revealed by Final Mix. I made this discovery after the fic was in progress and I already had the whole thing worked out. It concerned me for a while, but ultimately I decided to stick with the story as I originally envisioned it. Changing it would have compromised the integrity of the story, and that should become clear once you've read it. It just wouldn't have been the same. So—please forgive my willful ignorance.

* * *

**4.**

Days passed with a particular cadence. On good days, most of the morning was taken up by sleep, followed by a quick breakfast and then a portal to wherever the assignment of the moment happened to be. This was usually followed by either convincing some bigwig or other with a tint of darkness hanging in the air about himself (or herself) to side with the Organization--usually in this instance whoever he was partnered with did the talking, Roxas didn't quite have a grasp of diplomacy, especially with greedy idiots; or, preferably, swinging Keyblades through swarms of Heartless until his entire body ached in a comfortable, post-battle way. On good days, this was followed by dinner and a warm bed and sleep.

On good days, his partner was Axel.

On not so good days, the schedule was approximately the same only with significantly less food and sleep, and generally involved the company of someone like Xaldin--or no company at all aside from a throng of Dusks.

He brought back souvenirs, sometimes--although they were mostly random items that either he or a lesser Nobody picked up somewhere. The corner of a ripped cinema poster. A fluorescent green plush toy. A blue plastic 12-sided die. A lump of white coral with spindly branches shaped almost like a curled, skeletal hand. A box of rainbow-colored thumbtacks. They sat on his bookshelf with the face-down mirror and the worn, unopened book.

When he thought about it, he realized he was saving pieces of memory. Like he was afraid he'd lose it otherwise.

On other days--days that were neither good or bad, just lacking in an assignment and leaving him alone and bored in the Castle--he took breakfast lazily, cleaned up the mess that his room always seemed to fall into during a long mission, then suited up and went to the city to hunt.

It used to be that he'd come out here to train, or just to carve through some Heartless to stave off boredom. He'd memorized the place, all its turns and angles and crooked buildings and electric billboards crackling with static. He'd climbed the walls and scoured the rooftops and sometimes, he thought he felt like he'd made the place his own. Like the glass and metal and concrete had become an extension of his existence.

These days, though, he ignored the Heartless unless they got too close or too numerous. These days, he hunted the boy in black.

Sometimes Roxas couldn't find him and would return to the Castle when the rain started falling too hard, frustrated, disembodied Keyblades vibrating in the netherspace around him. On those days he could usually find Xigbar on his balcony and waste some time loading ugly figurines into the trap while Xigbar shot down whatever happened to be annoying him on that particular day.

Sometimes while he was hunting, Demyx or Axel would show up looking for him and he had to stop. He figured they probably knew about the intruders--Xemnas had brought it up at that meeting just after he and Xigbar tracked them down, the one where everyone sat and tried to ignore the five empty seats and tried to not ignore them at the same time. The one where Demyx fidgeted even more than usual until the Superior told him to sit the rest of the meeting out. The one where Axel, instead of covertly pulling faces or mocking whomever happened to be intoning melodramatically at any moment to try and force a smile out of Roxas, had instead sat silent and staring straight ahead with fingers tapping against his armrests.

He decided, though, that the others didn't need to know about his fights with the boy in black. Xigbar hadn't approved, initially, although he'd never mentioned anything about it since. The rest of the Organization might have something to say about Roxas taking on a known enemy and possible spy on his own, but he didn't care--this was something that was his. He didn't want to share.

He wasn't sure where the selfishness came from, either.

Sometimes Roxas caught him, cornered and off-guard, and let him fight his way out. Sometimes, the boy in black caught Roxas--on a rooftop or in an alley, and sometimes then, things would get dangerous. Because he was sure--at least at first--that the boy in black was just toeing the line of being better than him, just that much stronger and that much faster, and sometime Roxas had to cheat and call a few Dusks to get away. And the boy would chuckle softly at the hood would turn in a headshake, and he'd disappear into the city and let Roxas go for that day.

Every time he met him, though, Roxas thought he'd gotten a little weaker. Just a touch, just a shade slower or a fraction of a drop in power. He wasn't sure if it was because he himself was getting better, or if it was because the boy in black was gradually losing his touch.

Sometimes, they found each other on equal ground and simply drew their weapons and fought. Sometimes Roxas used both Keyblades, sometimes just one, and occasionally--for a change of pace or a greater measure of equality, or just because the boy in black seemed amused whenever he did it--he'd toss one of the keys to the other and sleek black would clash with silver-white.

Sometimes it seemed like neither of them would ever win. And Roxas was fine with that, because he'd had a crawling feeling in his spine ever since the first fight--when he'd summoned his blades and the other had balked--that when one or the other of them lost, they'd have to show their faces.

In his gut, he knew this had something to do with truth, and part of Why. But even as desperate as he was to know the answers, something held him back. The coil of fear in his stomach that offered up the unexplained knowledge that yes, this boy could probably tell him what he wanted to know--but once he knew it, Roxas would wish he didn't.

So he fought instead. For months he fought, with the boy in black and with Heartless and with stupid bosses and warlords and what-the-fuck-ever bigwigs on their high horses who didn't seem to understand just what was going on, here. For months he sidestepped Demyx's waterforms and silently followed Xigbar through the shadows and kept Axel from burning down anything important.

He wasn't sure how long it was, ultimately, before he remembered that he'd forgotten.

* * *

He remembered precisely where he was when it happened, though. Axel had found a nest of Neoshadows and Wizards on the outskirts of Twilight Town, happily feasting on some of the suburban residents there. And although they didn't have much concern for the residents themselves--more hearts to fly up and away to that moon-thing above the Castle, didn't matter where they came from--there was some concern about the sheer quantity, and so Axel swiped him through a portal from their perch on the clocktower and right into the thick of hunger-frenzied Heartless.

Axel would assure him, later, that it had seemed like a good idea at the time.

Roxas jabbed him in the kidney with an elbow, the two of them back to back, weapons in both hands, while the swarms of darkness circled around them. "Feeling a little regret?"

"What, aren't you having fun?" Axel twirled one chakram idly around a finger, blade-tips lighting one by one into flame. "Thought this was your element, Rox."

"You made me drop my ice cream."

"Bitch, bitch," Axel muttered, but his voice was light and amused.

It ended up being a good day, even when he'd been plowing through the hordes so long that the stink of dead Heartless clung to him like a cloud. Even when he got separated from Axel and had to touch base with him by responding to the guy yelling at the top of his lungs over the roofs of houses and the depleting swarms.

"HEY, ROXAS! YOU STILL ALIVE?"

If you can call it that, he thought, but just called back, "IDIOT!" and figured that was enough.

He wasn't sure when it was, exactly--sometime near the end, with just a few straggling Heartless running around, or he wouldn't have lost his concentration long enough to see it. There was a corkboard on the side of a building, a place for the people who lived in that neighborhood to post announcements or advertisements. Someone would babysit for 10 munny per hour. Someone was selling their lawnmower. A poster about some fighting competition that the town seemed to be big on.

In the center, though, was a glossy picture--an ad for a travel agency and train tickets at the lowest price of the year, get yours now! or somesuch. A spread of deep greens and blues. Sunlit beach, swaying palms, a drift of sand leading to rolling waves so blue it almost hurt to look at it.

And everything just seemed to stop for a moment, like the world had frozen under a sheet of ice. He felt cold even with sweat rolling down his back under the heavy coat.

There was something, there and bright and scratching in the back of his mind. Something about a beach.

_--hands curled in the sand beneath him, letting it trickle between--_

Memory was like a twine of black and white, fading together into gray and he tugged, pulled at the tangles and tried to reach through, between them, into--

_--reaching out with fingers and toes and when he opened his eyes--_

His Other had yellow sneakers. Yellow. Pulsing in and out of memory, steady heartbeat--

_--up already? Come on--_

Warm beach. Yellow. Yellow like a... like... a...

_What is your name, boy?_

His name was--

* * *

When Axel found him, he was holding the glossy print advertisement in one gloved hand, curled so tight it crushed and crinkled at the edge. Axel found him there in that moment with all the certainty that he'd forgotten something he knew, once--and this time, it wasn't something he'd known once before he woke up screaming in the Old Castle. It was something he'd known here, in _this_ life. And he'd lost it, somehow, left it behind like a coin that fell through a hole in his pocket or that one thing he'd forgotten to pack before leaving on a trip.

He remembered laughing, just slightly--perhaps a bit hysterically--at the irony that he had lost his Other in the same way his Other had lost him.

He remembered the look on Axel's face. That same one he'd had when Roxas first met him, in the doorway to his room staring at the boy inside and the crushed remains of his artificial life scattered around him. The way his eyes went wide and his face went slack and his mouth was impossibly three times smaller than it usually was.

Axel wore that look long after Roxas grabbed his arm and portaled them both back to the Castle, directly into his room.

There should have been a pair of shoes at the bottom of his bookshelf. They were mostly white, he remembered, and scuffed with use, and he'd worn them up until he got his Organization uniform and started wearing the boots instead.

They were gone.

There should have been a yellow paper lantern in the shape of a star hanging from his ceiling, in the corner over his desk, where it would throw spots of light over the bed and the window that danced in the air currents. In the dark it would give off a golden glow that made the shadows in the corners of the room shrink away.

It was gone.

There should have been a brown paper package under the mattress at the foot of his bed. Inside were a carefully folded pair of blue pants and a yellow shirt, fabric trapping a scent that had seemed familiar, once. Tucked in with the clothing, there was a piece of paper, dark with ink, a single word scribbled over and over both front and back, a thousand times. His name.

The package and all its contents were gone.

When Roxas had finished tearing his room apart and stood in the center of it helplessly, hands spread in front of him and empty, Axel still had that look.

"What the hell are you doing," he said softly, and it wasn't exactly a question. More like a quiet observation.

"Axel," he said, and that was just a reassurance that he was there, and Roxas hadn't lost anything else. "What's my name?"

"Roxas."

"No." His hands were shaking, so he curled them into fists and dropped them to his sides. "My real name. You know it. You said it once."

Axel started to shake his head, and then his expression changed. His eyes narrowed, his mouth dropped into a frown, then fell open as he looked to the side, like trying to look backwards in his mind. He was thinking the same thing.

Dark city in the rain, drenched and drowned out by the white noise of it falling. Fear and hope and longing all mixed and mingled together.

Axel said, "I don't remember."

Roxas collected the picture of the beach from the floor where he'd dropped it, and sat it on the bookshelf, next to the book he'd never opened. Some days, it seemed like it stared out of the shelf and mocked him.

* * *

He should have known that sooner or later, the boy in black was going to cheat, too.

When Roxas thought back to it, there was really no way that should have happened. He was always focused when they fought, so focused he could hear the shift of air when they moved and the subtle tone of his opponent's breath. They were at a point where they could predict each other with a kind of instinct that was uncanny and largely unsettling. Although, when he thought about it again, Roxas had felt something coming for a while, now--something building up in the air every time he entered the city, like the world was taking a deep breath.

And then he ducked a swing aimed at his head, and only after he'd done it did he realize the swing hadn't been meant for him at all. Fabric pulled at his hair, and the hood dropped against his back with a heavy and final _thunk_.

The boy in black paused at this, backed off slightly and shifted to the side with a surge of curiosity. Roxas felt eyes scrutinizing his every feature from beneath that hood, felt it and hated it, narrowed his eyes and tightened his grip on the Keyblades and charged.

It was fast. Fast in a way that he didn't remember the boy in black ever being before. Their blades met, caught, sparks flew and bodies doubled back to swing again, and then in an instant when the clang of metal was still ringing in the air something struck, just at his temple, and he was flying backwards and landing on the rain-spattered pavement with a force that shocked the air out of his lungs and the light from in front of his eyes.

When his lungs had recovered and found their rhythm again and his eyes blinked and the world around him resolved back into focus, there was a black-gloved hand curled around his chin, and he was staring up into the abyss beneath a black hood. Too close, so close he could almost see the shadows of a face.

The Voice said, "You shouldn't let your guard down."

And that... that _smell_...

_He was late, he knew, running across the sand and kicking it all over himself in the process, __darting down the memorized path from beach to roof to bridge, leaping down in one final rush before skidding to a halt, bent over his knees and panting. Dusting sand off tanned skin and red, red shorts and reaching up to rub sweat from his forehead, mingling in brown hair against his skin and sticking there, before he looked up._

_Sharp, bright laughter reached his ears and he smiled at the figure before him--blue and yellow and silver in the sunlight, wooden sword swinging at his side, face half-turned over his shoulder and aquamarine eyes half-irritated, but mostly pleased._

_"Where the hell have you been, anyway?"_

Roxas felt his face going slack, his eyes wide and his mouth dropping open, and he knew the expression wasn't his--it wasn't, but it felt _Right_ there, in the way that so few things ever felt Right. He felt his mouth forming around the word before the sound even left his throat.

"Riku?"

The figure hovering over him went so completely still that he wasn't even breathing. The air was tight and fragile until being broken abruptly by the metal clatter of the bat-winged weapon slipping through his fingers and tumbling to the ground. He murmured another name, and his hand slipped from Roxas's chin to cup his cheek.

"_Sora_."

And in Roxas's mind, black and white uncoiled and snapped taut and he ifound/i it.

His name was _Sora_.

No. No, his Other's name was Sora.

Roxas broke into motion suddenly, shoving the boy off of him--Riku, that's what he'd said, the boy from Sora's memories, the one whose clothes he found in the corner room of the old Castle, the one who had called his name the first time Roxas remembered and the one who said it again just now.

The name made a soft flicker of a beat where his heart should have been. _Riku_.

Roxas shoved it back angrily, shoved it away because it didn't belong to him and it never had. It belonged to Sora, all of this belonged to Sora and no matter how Right it felt it wasn't _his_.

The Keyblades reappeared in his hands and Riku stepped back, careful distance, collecting his weapon, and shoved his own hood back.

He looked older, Roxas thought, and shook his head because he only remembered a general idea of Riku--but the boy before him was taller, his hair was long enough to trail over his shoulders and a thick strip of black fabric was tied over his eyes. He raised his weapon, pointing it at Roxas like he had the first time they fought. "Is this how it's gonna be?"

Roxas crouched and leveled the Keyblades at his sides, waiting. "Maybe."

"What's with that look?"

"What's with the blindfold?"

Riku laughed softly, and it was low and sharp, and it was still the brightest sound Roxas had ever heard.

He scowled and darted forward, resuming the battle with a kind of intensity he'd never quite felt before now, with this particular opponent. Maybe not with anyone or anything, ever. "Something funny?"

Riku blocked his movements almost effortlessly--which was infuriating and he had no idea how the hell Sora put up with this guy--sidestepping and dodging and never offering any retaliation.

"Nothing," Riku murmured somewhere in the middle of it, but his lips were drawn in a small smile. "I've just missed this, that's all."

Roxas ignored the sentiment, shifting his focus so he was gradually driving Riku back towards a wall. Into a corner. Neon bright around the edges of his vision and nothing but black and silver between it.

Riku wasn't surprised when his back hit the wall--in fact, he seemed to be expecting it because his weapon shot up to lock with the Keyblade that swung at his chest and his arm shot out to catch Roxas's other wrist. "Sora," he said in that same soft tone and the smile was gone, and Roxas wondered if he could really see past that blindfold. He could feel eyes criticizing his face. "What happened to you?"

"I'm not Sora." Roxas hissed the retort through his teeth, bearing down but Riku, despite being the one against the wall, had him pinned.

The other boy considered this for a moment, then that smile reappeared. "Yeah, actually. You are."

Roxas jerked back, tugging his hand out of Riku's grip and dismissing both Keyblades, stepping backwards into safer space and reaching back to jerk his hood forward, down over his face to hide from the gaze that he couldn't even see.

Riku didn't follow when he stalked away into the city and the rain, but he never expected him to. He thought he might hear a voice calling after him, but he didn't. He thought he himself might turn back around, but he didn't. He walked until the Castle loomed before him and walked until he reached the door with the black numeral XIII etched on it and opened it, stalking inside and flinging his damp coat across the room and dropped onto the bed, on his back, and spent the rest of the day staring at the ceiling.

At night, when his room darkened, he wished his lantern hadn't disappeared into the void this place existed in. He wanted to see dancing stars roam over the walls.

* * *

_Sora closed his eyes and focused hard enough that his teeth closed over his lower lip. He curled one hand in a fist, lifted it, then with practiced certainty brought it down to slam against his palm. One. Two. Three._

_"Scissors," he declared triumphantly._

_"Scissors, hyuk," echoed a voice to his right._

_"Paper." A third voice added, also with a note of triumph, until the owner of the voice backtracked and descended into an indignant quack._

_Sora opened his eyes, looking down to see the three sets of hands outstretched in a triangle. Although, to be fair, one of the hands was mostly feathers. "Donald gets kitchen duty."_

_The duck, however, was not to be swayed so easily, and proved this by hopping up and down and flapping one wing in total rejection of the entire idea. "I demand a rematch. Rematch!"_

_Sora grinned and folded his hands behind his head, rocking back and forth on his heels. "Rock, Paper, Scissors reigns supreme. Kitchen duty."_

_Donald muttered something garbled under his breath, turning in a huff to stalk back into the gummiship's galley, kicking the door closed behind him with one webbed foot._

_A moment later, something large and metallic collapsed somewhere behind the door, followed by a fit of squawking and a clatter. Sora screwed up his face and cringed a bit. "Ouch."_

_"Gawrsh, Sora, maybe we oughta go help him."_

_"Nah, he'll be fine." Sora waved a hand dismissively and turned back to the ship's controls, pausing with another wince when an even louder crash echoed from beyond the door. "Probably. Besides, everyone can use a dose of humility from time to time, right?"_

_Goofy shrugged and chuckled a _hyuk hyuk_ of agreement, loping over to climb into the pilot's chair. "You suppose that's why that Phil fella keeps telling us we're not true heroes?"_

_"Hmm." Sora ruffled both hands through his hair, wandering over to a small, round window with deliberately exaggerated steps only to collapse against it, arms folded over the top curve, forehead resting against a forearm. "That could be."_

_Beyond the portal the universe swirled in shifting colors and rainbow fog and endless fields of stars. He smiled at it, image reflecting back at him, wide-eyed and unafraid of the enormity of what was passing before him outside the small ship. Sora didn't think in terms of scope and danger and probability, only in terms of right and wrong, friend and foe; and he understood that the two were not mutually exclusive. Understood it far, far too well. The blacks and the __whites, and the grays._

In his own corner of the universe, Roxas woke up and crossed his room in the darkness to turn over the mirror on his bookshelf and prop it upright. He reached up with both hands and tugged his hair out to the sides, and tried offering a toothy grin that felt strange and Right on his face--and there, in the mirror, was Sora, grinning back at him.

* * *

"You've got to be kidding me."

Roxas shoved his hands in his pockets and kept walking. "I couldn't make this up."

"No. Seriously." Axel scuffed one foot on the floor of the Castle corridor they were walking down, details of their next assignment clutched in a folder in one gloved hand. He looked at Roxas over his shoulder, stark incredulity and a smirk in his expression. "_Seriously_. An oversized talking duck and dog. In a spaceship."

Roxas grit his teeth behind his lips and kept walking.

"You haven't been smoking any of that, eh... _tobacco_ they sell in Agrabah, have you?"

Roxas made a low, warning sound somewhere in his throat. Axel seemed to miss it.

"You know not to drink those bottles in Wonderland, right? Just because they say 'Drink Me' doesn't mean it's a good idea."

Roxas stopped abruptly. "See, Axel. This is why I don't tell you anything."

"Yeah, because it's totally normal to be running around between the worlds in a spaceship with giant talking animals."

"Axel."

"Not to mention using a giant _key_ as a weapon. Come on."

"I have two," Roxas said very, very calmly, summoning them as he said so and offering his partner his coldest stare. "And they can both kick your ass."

Axel stepped back and held up both hands in surrender, one of them still clutching the file. "Point taken. I concede defeat. You are clearly not under the influence of any mysterious off-world drugs."

Roxas rolled his eyes and dismissed the Keyblades, and spun on his heel to continue walking.

"Your Other, though," Axel commented after a moment, holding the folder up and pressed against his shoulder, head tilted back in contemplation. "He must've been something else."

Roxas shook his head and turned to opened the door to his room, scowling down at his hands. Because Axel knew Sora--had to have met him at some point, to know his name and know he was alive. Roxas wasn't going to bring it up, though--because if Axel had forgotten and had forgotten telling Roxas, he was probably safer that way.

When the door swung open and he looked up, he stopped, still there and blocking the entrance. Fortunately, Axel was taller and could see the object of his bemusement over his shoulder.

"Oh yeah, I found that in that closet by the kitchens. The one the Dusks are always in and out of." Axel gestured over his head to the yellow paper lantern, star-shaped, back in its place over his desk. "Thought I remembered it being yours, so." He trailed off, hand waving absently then dropping to settle on Roxas's shoulder.

"...Thanks."

"No prob."

* * *

The closest he ever came to beating Riku happened one night when the eternal storm over the city was particularly bad. Flashes of lightning threw them both in and out of high relief, rain pouring in a torrent that drowned out the sounds of their movements, breaths, muffling and blurring everything until Roxas was relying mostly on instinct. All the times he'd fought Riku, all the times his Other had fought Riku, all of them were worn into his muscles well enough by now that he probably could have worn a blindfold, too.

Riku had probably intended to suggest that they stop and wait out the storm for a while. The first word that came out of his mouth, though, was: "Sora--"

Roxas growled in frustration and charged, Keyblades slicing the raindrops in midair and landing hard against the bat-wing blade. "Stop calling me that!"

Riku smirked just a little, dodging out of the way yet again. "Sora."

And he wanted, so badly, just to knock him down. Because memories were seeping through the cracks in his mind, and Riku had always been like this. He was older and stronger and faster, self-assured in a way the younger kids envied and intense in a way that made adults worry.

_But Riku was always there. Riku was there if he swam too far out from the shore. If he climbed too high in one of the palm trees. He was there for every bruise and scrape, every triumph of climbing or fishing or the next great work of art decorating the walls of their cave. He was there to challenge Sora, to push him to push himself. There to share stories, jokes, dreams. Riku was always there.  
__  
Even when after one day, he wasn't._

The clang of weapons was loud even over the sound of the rain. "You were always like this. _Always_."

Riku's smile vanished, moving faster now as the Keyblades spun in front of him, too fast sometimes to block but not fast enough to strike. His hair was long since drenched, plastered to the sides of his face in silver sheets.

"You always had to be the one in control!" Clash of metal again and Roxas kept swinging, and it was like the world was finally exhaling through him and he couldn't stop it. "You always had to be the best at everything. You couldn't stand it if you weren't the one who came out on top. You always had to be better than me no matter what and you'd never just... just STOP!"

And with the last word, Riku's weapon flew out of his hand and crashed against a wall, dropping to clatter and splash on the pavement. And Riku dropped his arms to his sides, staring at Roxas through his blindfold, tip of the black Keyblade against his throat.

They stood there, drawing breath and drenching in rain for a moment, before Riku said, "Do you hate me?"

Roxas paused, drew back. Felt that flutter of something in his chest that wasn't his. The blades dropped to his sides and glinted wetly in a flash of lightning.

"No."

* * *

Roxas found he despised his meetings with Xemnas considerably less once he had his own chair to sit in.

It was only once monthly, which Roxas found fortunate, but he surmised that the frequency had dropped after half their members were killed and the rest had to pick up the slack. It was a bit of monotony that occasionally punctuated his half-life, roughly an hour in the white behemoth of a meeting room regurgitating all the assignments he'd been on, details of how they went, what was accomplished, and etcetera. At the end, Xemnas would usually pose a few questions of his own. Was he working well with his teammates. Did he feel he was ready for more challenging tasks. And the Superior would stare him down with those yellow eyes, hands folded in front of his face, and wait for the response.

It was usually: I get along with them fine. I prefer working with Axel. And yes, of course.

On that particular day, though, Xemnas shuffled a paper across his desk and leaned back in his chair, hands folding properly on his lap, and Roxas knew he was in for something. Still, he started just enough to be noticeable when Xemnas said, "So. I hear you've met Riku."

He faltered, eyebrows drawing together and opened his mouth to make a retort, but the Superior was continuing on without notice.

"I would advise that you not listen too intently to anything that boy might say." Xemnas's yellow stare flickered with the same challenge he recognized from their first meeting. Asking for his name, knowing the answer Roxas was going to give. "He fell to the darkness long ago. There's no telling the difference between truth and deceit with lost souls like him."

It took him just a moment--just a fraction of a second in which he almost took Xemnas at his word, believed that Riku was really lost to the darkness and was no longer the same boy Sora remembered.

For that instant, he believed, but after it passed he knew that Xemnas was lying.

And after it passed Roxas knew with the instinct he used to fight--against Heartless, against Riku--and the inner understanding of things that were Right and things that were Wrong, that this man knew everything. About him, about his Other, about why he existed and how Sora could still be alive and, probably, where Sora was now.

And he knew that Xemnas had no intention of ever telling him anything. He knew Xemnas was probably under the impression that Roxas had forgotten Sora, like everyone else apparently had--that he'd probably ordered the underlings to clear all the reminders of Sora from Roxas's room to perpetuate the fade of memory.

And he knew that Xemnas had every intention of keeping him here for as long as possible, the Organization's Thirteen, loyal to the cause. Their trump card, the Nobody of the great Keyblade Master.

He knew he'd been a prisoner since the moment he stepped through that portal.

Roxas schooled his expression to understanding, giving an acquiescing nod to the man orchestrating this fiasco. "Do you want me to kill him?"

Xemnas chuckled and the sound was almost pleasant. "If you can."

It was the first time he thought about leaving.

* * *

The next time he found Riku, he was standing under an overhang near the skyscraper, watching the rain dripping off the eaves to puddle on the ground. He never wore his hood anymore, despite the city's unforgiving elements, and when Roxas approached he just tilted his head sideways, eyes hidden behind the blindfold.

Roxas remembered what color they were. Light, aqua green, like the inside of a melon or the clear depths in patches of the ocean.

"My boss said I could kill you," he declared by way of greeting.

Riku seemed unsurprised by this development, although his eyebrows did raise slightly in question. "You going to?"

"Maybe."

Riku turned back to the rain and the flicker of neon beyond it, chuckling softly. "You have to beat me first, Sora."

"Stop calling me that," Roxas hissed, turning to lean back against the wall several feet away, mirroring Riku's position. Settling his gaze in the same direction.

"What should I call you, then?"

"Roxas."

"Creative," Riku murmured around a smirk, like he was assimilating the name and filing it away with no intention of ever actually using it.

The rain fell in silence for several long minutes, tapping against the puddles around the overhang and splashing against the toes of Roxas's boots. He breathed out in a huff after a while, reaching up to shove back his hood and turned his head just enough to see Riku's profile. "Where is he?"

Riku jerked head to the side, away from his contemplation of the rain and into a slow contemplation of Roxas. "What?"

"Sora. Where is he?"

Riku's mouth opened and closed, like he wanted to ask just how Roxas didn't know a thing like that, then he swallowed. "Sleeping."

Roxas shoved away from the wall and stalked closer, just enough that he could probably start a fight if he wanted. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"You know." Riku's mouth drew into a tight line, then curved into a poor imitation of a smile. "I only remember him when I'm with you."

Roxas hissed under his breath. "That's not--"

"What do you remember?"

Rain dropped on his shoulder and Roxas moved closer to the wall, folding his arms and leaning back against it again. Riku didn't want to fight today, for whatever reason. He didn't want to answer anything, either. Roxas sniffed and watched the ripples forming and breaking across a puddle. "Your favorite color is yellow. You're afraid of spiders. You can hold your breath underwater for two minutes. You snore. You try to convince people you don't like sweets but you'll eat an entire pan of brownies on your own. You broke your arm falling off the roof of the shack when you were eight and cried like a baby. You sleep with stuffed animals you keep hidden under your bed. Want me to keep going?"

Riku was laughing again--low and sharp, bright and longer this time, shoulders shaking with it. Roxas chuckled under his breath, unfolding his arms and shoving his hands in his pockets.

"I think you forgot something," Riku said after a moment, voice still light with laughter.

_You called down the darkness and destroyed the world. You betrayed me. Turned against me._

Roxas almost opened his mouth and said it. Almost, but something stopped him. "What?"

Riku's eyebrows traveled up again, part of the expression always blank behind the blindfold, but his smirk was pulling to the side knowingly. "What do I taste like?"

He blinked. Frowned, because--

_"Close your eyes."_

_Riku leaned back against the wall of the cave, silver brows cocked in disbelief and a teasing light creeping into his eyes. "Why?"_

_"Just do it."_

_He looked like he was going to argue for a minute, but Sora retaliated first, hands curled into fists defiantly and mouth dropping into a pout. Riku rolled his eyes a little but sat back, palms in the sand on either side of his folded legs, and closed his eyes. "There. Now what?"_

_"It's a surprise."_

_Sora had decided on this weeks ago--and when Sora decided on something, he went about doing it with a single-minded tenacity that put stampeding bulls to shame. He came up with a method. He researched, and practiced a little--which was awkward but, in his mind, necessary. And at this point, all he had to do was goad Riku into going along with it._

_That much was easy. All it took was a few nudges at his pride._

_Sora crawled forward until their knees were knocking together, then leaned forward until his hands were propped against the cave wall on either side of Riku's head. Riku must have sensed he was being closed in at that point, because his head jerked to the side and silver eyelashes fluttered._

_"No peeking."_

_Riku turned his face towards the sound of Sora's voice and the feel of breath against his cheek, and his voice wavered just slightly. "What are you doing?"_

_"You scared?"  
__  
"_No_," Riku said instantly, loudly, and Sora knew he'd won._

_He leaned forward a little more and slowly, carefully, brushed their lips together._

_It didn't last very long, but it tingled, and it was surprising, how cool Riku's mouth felt. How nice it felt when their lips parted around each other and caught together. The soft, smacking sound when they pulled away._

_Sora sat back on his heels, laughing at Riku's thunderstruck expression and the tint of pink around his ears. Licked his lips and grinned. "You've been swimming," he chuckled, leaning forward to poke Riku in the shoulder and shake him out of the staring trance he'd fallen into. "You taste like--"_

"--sea salt," Roxas finished.

Riku nodded, brief incline of the head that made his hair slide against his cheeks, smirk softening into a smile. And then he was reaching out, hand slipping around the back of Roxas's neck and tugging him closer. And then--

_It was an experiment. He wasn't sure at what point they had decided this, but they had, and that was the bottom line every time they secluded themselves in the cave, away from the others, or sometimes at night after sneaking out of their beds and paddling out to the island by starlight._

_The justification was: eventually, they were probably going to want to kiss someone else. A girl, probably, because that was the normal thing to do when boys became teenagers. Until then, there couldn't have been any harm in getting some practice in._

_Riku liked it when Sora tilted his head back. Liked it when he made little humming sounds in his throat. Liked it, particularly, when Sora shivered and pulled him closer._

_Sora liked Riku's tongue because it felt squishy in his mouth, and because when he rubbed his own tongue against it Riku would make a low, breathy noise and his hands would fist in the back of Sora's shirt._

_And sometimes--_

--his back hit the wall and he was losing track of who he was. Whether he was Sora in a cave on an island or Roxas in the rain in a city that didn't exist. And in both of them, both halves of the boy and both of the worlds, Riku was kissing him like the rain was the universe crumbling around his head, breaking in hot gasps of breath and hands sliding from his shoulders to his waist to crush him closer. And he was kissing back, both hands behind Riku's head and pressing up into it, at a loss for what to do otherwise because his senses were just waking up and his mind and body were remembering things he'd never even considered before.

It was foreign and familiar, the electric shiver down his spine and the heat of a body against his own. And--

_--sometimes when they kissed it would go on a little too long, or go a little too deep, or they would press a little too close, and then a pleasant burn would follow anywhere Riku touched him and heat would pool in the space between his hips, and he'd shudder when Riku's lips trailed down his neck. Breath would come a little faster and hands would tug a little harder and lips and tongues would move against each other with a little more desperation--a little more want, a little more need, and the air between them would throb with it._

_And usually he wanted to say 'Don't stop' but at times when this happened, like a mutual agreement they would rip themselves away from each other and sit at opposite ends of the cave, shaking and flushed and breathing too hard, until the heat drained away and they were able to go back out into the sunlit world._

_Once, though, he was on his back in the sand and Riku's knee slipped between his legs and he saw stars--_

--and in the city in the rain Riku's mouth was on his neck and his head was dropping back and thunking against the cold brick wall behind him, gasping against silver hair. Scratching ineffectively at Riku's shoulders, gloves sliding loose against the black coat, and his own coat was falling open under Riku's hands and palms were sliding over the clothes beneath.

And it was like that--a little too much of everything--press of skin covered by too much cloth and crawling with the sensation of _touch_ that he knew and didn't know at the same time. And he whimpered the way that Sora would whimper, and he shivered the way that Sora would shiver, and Riku murmured the name repeatedly in breath against his skin.

_Sora Sora Sora._

He thought: maybe if Riku loved him enough, he would turn back into Sora.

_Sometimes it was just slow and quiet. Sometimes Riku would just lean back in the sand with his arms folded behind his head, and Sora would flop down to snuggle against Riku's stomach, and they would just stay like that for a while._

_Sometimes Riku kissed him gently, softly, fingers trailing down his cheek in a kind of reverence, and his heart would--_

_His heart would--_

They broke apart at the same time and Roxas leaned back against the wall and sucked in breath--now very certain that he _was_ Roxas and he was in his city, smell of rain and Riku mingling around him, and that the boy in the blindfold holding himself at arms length still belonged to Sora and not to him.

"I miss you, you know," Riku murmured.

Roxas shook his head--not at the sentiment, exactly, but because his temples were starting to ache from so much memory flowing back into his mind and his body hurt from so many sensations running through it, and because Riku just could not arrive at his own understanding. That he wasn't Sora, no matter how badly either of them wanted him to be.

"Where is he?" he asked for the second time that night, and this time Riku sighed in defeat.

"Not today." Riku reached out, ran his fingers along the edges of Roxas's hair. "I'll tell you though. I promise."

He wavered there for a moment, on the line between giving in and jerking away. Ultimately, Roxas chose the latter, zipping his coat back up and pulling up his hood. "Don't do that."

Riku's mouth dropped open and his tongue wet his lips, and Roxas remembered that gesture. Could almost see the look in his eyes that went with it. "Do what?"

"Don't touch me like that." Roxas shoved away from the wall and stepped out into the rain, feeling the comforting pat-pat of it dripping onto his hood. "You're not mine."


	5. 5

**PLEASE NOTE: There is smut in this chapter. **Fair warning. Although, if you're like me, right now you're saying "OOOOOH!" and reading faster. Yes. You're welcome.

**Standard Disclaimer:** I do not own Kingdom Hearts. I do own half of the house that I live in, and my half happens to include the den, which is where I write. That must count for something.

**Warnings:** Language, violence, boy/boy situations (up to and including sex), spoilers for KH, KH2 and probably CoM as well.

**Pairings:** Axel/Roxas, with some Riku/Roxas that is really Riku/Sora, and also some actual Riku/Sora. Par for the course.

**Casey would like you to note:** Almost done! I'd like to thank everyone who has reviewed or favorited or put this fic on their alerts over the past couple of days. Couldn't hope for a better welcome.

I'm aware that some of this doesn't line up with canon, particularly the parts revealed by Final Mix. I made this discovery after the fic was in progress and I already had the whole thing worked out. It concerned me for a while, but ultimately I decided to stick with the story as I originally envisioned it. Changing it would have compromised the integrity of the story, and that should become clear once you've read it. It just wouldn't have been the same. So—please forgive my willful ignorance.

* * *

**5.**

The seventh emotion he felt, he didn't think really qualified as an emotion. More like a general feeling, a kind of nervous energy similar to Demyx when he had too much on his mind, only it didn't really manifest in the same way. He was just restless. Whether off-world on assignment or back in the Castle, in the city, fighting Heartless on whatever world he happened to be on. It didn't matter where he was or who he was with, all he ever wanted to do was go somewhere else. But then, having moved on to that 'somewhere else', he would find that the new environment was no better, and he just wanted to leave again.

He thought this might be called: discontent.

Roxas started to occupy himself on most days by identifying the things that belonged to him--as opposed to those that belonged to Sora. He felt like a disgruntled roommate, drawing a line down the center of his mind and demanding that all of his Other's belongings stay on _that_ side. That the clutter of his (former) life remain away from him and his own things.

The memories belonged to Sora.

_"Hey, have you ever looked in the opposite direction of the sunset?"_

_The girl on the end of the dock looked up from her crossed legs, where she was carefully stringing bits of coral and paua shell into a bracelet. He saw her from below, spread out and sprawled against the boards on his back, watching the dim twinkle of a star just beginning to appear above them while the sun sank into the ocean and burned it red and orange.  
__  
She pushed a lock of red hair behind one ear and the gesture was thoughtful, considerate. The side of her mouth tugged up just slightly. "You know, I don't think I have."_

_"You should." He leaned up just slightly, on his elbows, shoulders shrugged so it felt like his head was settled on them, t-shirt brushing the lobes of his ears. "The sky goes all purple and the stars come out. It's like... there's fire on one side of the sky, but there's something slow and calm growing on the other."_

_The girl tilted her head just so, just enough to lean over her own shoulder and look away from the demanding sunset, considering the palms and ferns jutting skyward off the island and the sky beyond. With her face turned just so, it was like one side of her was watching the sunset and the other was watching the alternative._

_Sora laughed softly, leaning sideways on his elbows so he was under her nose when she looked down. "Pretty cool, huh?"_

* * *

The city was his, because Sora didn't own anything that was Wrong. Riku was Sora's, but his fights with Riku were his. Sora had his own, and he figured they could separate out whose was whose and share that much.

The Castle was his. The little gray and white and glass room was his. The star lantern was his but the shape and color were Sora's. The things Roxas kept on the bookshelf (now with a green glass bottle and a folded red napkin added to the collection) were his, because whether they were reminders of his own memories or Sora's, Roxas had chosen them and placed them there.

Xigbar's ancient clay pigeon trap and the ugly figurines he shot down were his. Although, technically, they belonged to Xigbar--but Sora had nothing to do with the entire activity.

The Keyblade belonged to both of them, because it was different for Roxas than it was for Sora.

The darkness was his, and so was the light. Sora had neither, because hearts had both. Roxas didn't have a heart and Sora did, so he thought it was only fair.

Axel was his.

"What the hell is with you lately?"

Roxas sat on the edge of his bed with his elbows on his legs, hands dangling between his knees, and watched his fingers curl and straighten, flexing idly against his palms. "Don't know what you mean."

Axel rolled his eyes towards the ceiling, gaze darting around before resting on the lantern, turned on against the growing darkness outside. He was leaned back against the bookshelf, unconsciously careful not to elbow any of the contents. "What I mean is, a couple weeks ago I could have come in here and said 'Hey Roxas, wanna go on a twenty-day stint in Port Royal?' And you would have jumped at the chance."

"So maybe I don't feel like fighting undead pirates."

"No, but you sure as hell feel up to wandering around the city solo for days on end and fighting lowly Shadows and pretty-boys. It's like--"

Roxas's hands were suddenly curled around his knees, tightly, and his head finally shot up to look at Axel. "How did you know that?"

Axel blinked at him for all of two seconds and Roxas thought that he really did look put out. Disappointed, mouth drawn in a tight line. "I have eyes."

"What did you see?" Roxas felt his hands clenching tighter, and something tightening and clawing in his gut--almost like the fear, but this was subtly different. Something else that was warm at the edges and made his throat close on itself, and all he knew for certain was that he didn't want Axel to have seen him kissing Riku. Not because it was private or because he wanted to just forget the whole encounter, but because he didn't want _Axel_ to have _seen_ it.

Axel paused with his mouth half-open, and his attention darted to the window for a moment like he wasn't sure what was going on and whether or not it was okay to be looking at Roxas. He must have decided that eye contact was acceptable, eventually, because his gaze settled back where it had started. "I saw you with your giant keys and a dude with a blindfold and silver hair. You looked like you were holding your own so I didn't bother you."

The clawing subsided slightly, but Roxas still had to swallow before he could speak--and even after swallowing, he wasn't sure what to say. Axel shrugged his shoulders a bit, not really a gesture so much as a habit, coat hanging open over his chest and hands shoved in his pants pockets. Roxas just stared at him for a moment and Axel stared at the lantern again.

"Close your eyes," Roxas said.

Axel took an unconscious step forward, startled out of his contemplation of the yellow star. "Sorry, what?"

"Close your eyes."

"Yeah, I got that." Axel's expression was slowly drawing upwards, like his eyebrows, eyes widening and mouth becoming more vertical. "Why?"

Roxas stood up slowly, swallowing to clear his throat and curling his hands at his sides because they were shaking again. All for different reasons that he couldn't quite find a grasp of. "It's a surprise."

Axel still had that disbelieving and slightly dubious look on his face, but made a sound like a 'huh' and shrugged some more. His eyes closed and he stood still, waiting for whatever was supposed to happen. "Didn't think you were the type for presents."

"Shut up." Roxas stepped forward and felt the claws around his insides shiver with each movement. He wasn't sure where to put his hands--Sora had known, Sora had plotted the entire scenario out prior to the moment he actually kissed Riku, and Roxas was just here stealing his idea and winging it. He settled on reaching up and curling them around either side of Axel's open coat, the edges of the zipper sharp against his palms.

He wasn't sure whether to close his eyes or not and figured it didn't matter. He leaned in as close as he could without actually touching Axel. Tilted his head up and touched their lips together.

He didn't expect Axel to jerk back--it was an instinctive, startled movement, just slight, not enough to break completely away. Roxas nearly aborted this entire, insane idea and backed off, but Axel--having recovered from the initial shock and regained his composure--abruptly jerked his hands out of his pockets and wrapped his arms around Roxas and kissed him back.

Hard.

He had a few moments to contemplate the fact that this was completely unlike kissing Riku. Riku had been all rain and darkness, slow and intense and longing. Riku had been trapped in the past and dreaming of chocolate-brown hair and sun-tinted skin under his hands.

Axel was demanding, hot and intent and fully in the present.

He had a few moments to consider, eyes half open, the patch of skin below Axel's right eye, where the long diamond tattoo streaked down his cheek, until Axel's eyes opened to slits of green. Watching Roxas watch him.

Then Axel's eyes closed, and a hand slid up to tug on the hair at the back of his head and the clawing feeling in his stomach curled in on itself and warmed. Then teeth nipped at his lips and urged them apart, tongue slipping between and someone groaned. He thought it might have been him, but based on the hands tugging him closer he thought it was probably Axel. Maybe he had just gasped.

In the second to last moment he had, he contemplated how he'd been so desperate to find answers to his questions and desperate to find something or someone to fight and desperate to dredge up his lost memories all this time, while all this time Axel had just been desperate for _him_.

He shoved the coat off Axel's shoulders because it seemed like the thing to do and his hands were already there, anyway, and the shirt beneath it was warmer and closer to the skin that was beneath _that_. And Axel kept kissing him even after he'd pulled his hands away to tug the coat the rest of the way off, gloves disappearing with it and when they returned it was--different. Warmer and closer everywhere. Thin, thin fabric between skin and skin.

He definitely gasped, that time. Soft and light, small part of lips and a breath of air, a vague notion that he was stumbling backwards onto his bed and that things were going to happen there that Sora had been very, very careful to never think about too hard.

It was almost petulant, the idea that he could experience something his Other never had. Something of his own.

In the last moment he had to consider anything, he thought: maybe if Axel loved him enough, he could just keep being Roxas.

He forgave Axel for jerking away from the kiss, because he jerked away with the same shock and instinct when fingers slipped under his shirt and this was how he ended up falling backwards, onto the mattress, and he didn't have time to think about that at all before a warm body was pressing him down into it, heavy and hot everywhere and Axel's mouth was back on his, pressing and urgent and all he could do was tip his head back, curl his fingers in the shoulders of Axel's shirt and pull--and breathe.

Small movements at first, little touches, feathered over his stomach, down his back, up and palm-flat over his chest and at some point Axel yanked his own shirt off and there was skin under his hands, smooth and warm and when he pressed his fingers in and dragged them along the indent of Axel's spine it caused a shiver that made his own breath hitch. Mouth slid down his throat, sucking at the hollow where it dipped between collarbones and then a hand mimicked the movement, down his stomach, teasing there just above the waistband and then dipped down--

Oh. Oh _fuck_.

He realized he was shuddering and pressing up into the touch about the same time he realized he'd cursed out loud, and at the same time he realized that Axel was laughing. He was _laughing_, face pressed against Roxas's neck and the rest of his movements stilling.

He felt perfectly justified in punching Axel in the shoulder. Hard.

"S-sorry," Axel stuttered between chuckles, raising up just enough to drop a light kiss on his lips and continue laughing against them after. "You said fuck."

"It's not that funny." Roxas scowled, but Axel just hissed the last of his amusement against his chin and nipped along the line of his jaw, slowly, until Roxas's eyes slipped closed.

"It's funny coming from you," murmured against the skin underneath the corner where it sank against his neck, small dart of a tongue that trailed all the way up to his ear and Axel murmured against it. "Should've known you're not the whimpering type."

Roxas struggled to keep his voice even, because the breath against his skin made him shiver and his shirt was being pushed off, slow trail of fingers down his arms when he grabbed the fabric and helped it along and then that mouth was right back against his neck. "Do you even know what you're doing?"

"Mostly," Axel replied, voice almost a whisper and then the hand between his legs _squeezed_, and he stuttered out another curse--_f-fuck_--and Axel chuckled against the curve where neck met shoulder and he had nothing left to argue with.

Axel's hair was rough. He wasn't sure if it was the sweat against his palms that made it feel that way or if it just was, and maybe that was why it spiked out the way it did, but he curled one hand in it anyway when Axel's teeth closed around the skin just above, then aside, then below his navel, other hand fisted in the sheets he was lying on and tugging in time with each breath that shivered out of him and if he had a heart, it would be racing. His entire body would be pulsing with it and he thought, somewhere deep under his skin and in the space where it should have been that he could almost feel it. Subtle vibration, barely there.

Axel smelled like fire. Not like smoke, exactly, but sharp and fresh like oxygen being sucked out of the air. He noted this while leaning forward on his elbows, nose buried in the skin against Axel's cheek and kicking his pants off, and noted this at the same time as noting that they were both naked, now, and having half a second to wonder how he'd gotten from there to here--from the idea against the wall in the city with silver hair and wandering hands that being touched felt good, to the full reality, here and now, of being touched _everywhere_, and--_ohyesthere_--that didn't really count as a coherent thought, because it never finished.

His knees were pressed against Axel's hips, and there was sweat between them--sweat everywhere, on his lips when his tongue brushed against them and in Axel's mouth when it pressed against his and a sharp tang like pain, gritting his teeth against the feel of fingers sliding inside, because--_ohfuckyes_--wasn't so bad. Slow burn, heat shivering through him and settling, tightening and he tugged on the sheets, pressed up and breathed in short, harsh pants against Axel's neck.

Axel murmured something into his hair, mouth moving down hot and damp from there to his ear to his neck to his shoulder, murmuring something else at each spot but none of it sounded like anything, not like actual words. Fingers dug into his hips and then--

_Fuck._

Tense there, for a moment--_god god so deep so deep don't move yet_--head tilted back and teeth bared but it wouldn't stay back, his voice--Axel's hand running soothingly up and down along his side, bumping over ribs and muscle, groan against teeth against his shoulder and he sighed, whine in the back of his throat like a half-moan on his breath--_fuck_--

--_more_--

Axel murmured things against the hollow of his throat but even if they had been words--_ohgod_--nothing would have made sense. Nothing beyond the slide, slow push-pull and the tilt of his hips and electric shudders over his spine--_yes yes more_--and how he tried and tried to just gasp, every move and breath--_more_--but sometimes it was a moan. Sometimes Axel's hands would slide under his hips and against his back and his fingers would claw there, jerking him closer and harder _oh fuck_--

Something ripped under his fingers and the heat tightened to white.

_Ah--_

_G--god yes... A--AH--_

* * *

At some point when Roxas blinked he could see specks of gold on the ceiling. His breath shivered when he inhaled.

"Good?" Axel said against his hair, and his breath ruffled and tickled. Roxas wasn't entirely sure what he was asking--if he was okay, if he felt good, if he enjoyed that. Maybe all of those at once.

He turned absently into the warmth beside him, sweat sticking skin to skin and probably other things, too, but the haze of contentment that settled over him didn't care. The lethargy that seeped into his muscles dismissed anything aside from heat and comfort. He hummed, after a moment, in an attempt at response.

"You could stand to say _something_, you know," Axel muttered in a half-joking affront, fingers mussing and caressing through his hair, nails sliding against his scalp and he just murmured wordlessly again. "I've put up with you for almost a year, now. I figure you owe me a good word after a round of fantastic sex, at least."

Roxas considered this, half-asleep and yawning and spitting Axel's hair out of his mouth because it had drifted over one shoulder to tickle his nose. "The ocean," he muttered after a moment, flicking the lock of red away, "is how the world snores."

He fell asleep to the sound of Axel laughing.

* * *

Riku's memory belonged to Sora. The sound of his voice. The tilt of his smile when he laughed.

"Let's take a break," he said, somewhere in the middle of a fight that promised to be satisfyingly long, one gloved hand pushing his hair back in a move that was demure and arrogant at the same time. "I want to talk to you."

"Not yet."

Riku met his swing with the white key, one-handed. "Give it a rest, Sora."

Roxas did stop, at that point, but not for the reasons Riku wanted him to. He stopped and dismissed both Keyblades and had the sudden urge to continue on with just fists. "Why don't you get it?" He shoved Riku backwards suddenly, with one hand in a mirror of Riku's stalling move. "I'm not Sora. I never have been and I never will be, no matter how many times you call me by his name. So just--STOP."

Riku actually frowned at that--frowned and took a step back, dropping his arms to his sides, slightly casual but not surrendering yet. Roxas had that same, momentary sense of eyes staring at him, roaming over him and considering. It made him want to lunge forward and rip the damn blindfold off.

"You're the one who doesn't get it," Riku said carefully, shifting on his heels as though sensing that Roxas was on edge. "Every move you make, every sound, every look--is _him_." His mouth dropped open at the end of the sentence, tongue running along the edge of his teeth, considering his own words. "You're him. The parts of him most people don't see. Maybe you're what he could have been."

Roxas shook his head. He wanted to reject the entire idea, shatter it into a million pieces. One hand reached out to curl in the air.

"I said stop. I want to tell you something." Riku jerked his head to the side of the alley and walked away from him, fully expecting that Roxas would drop the fight and follow.

And, after a moment, he did. He followed Riku with his jaw set and when he sat down on a crate in a corner sheltered from the rain, Roxas sat across from him, arms folded and staring.

What Riku said, after a minute or two of the _pat-pat_ of rain and silence, was: "Do you remember how you died?"

"No," Roxas said, and some of the venom had drained out of his voice. This was part of the answer, part of Why, maybe--and just maybe Riku was finally going to tell him. "Were you there?"

"I was--" Riku started, then trailed off with his mouth still open. "Nearby."

_I am Ansem, seeker of darkness._

"You fought him," Roxas murmured, leaning on his knees and rubbing his temple--the beats of memory set off little twinges of pain in his head. Maybe because so much had been coming back lately. Maybe because they were painful. "He beat you."

Riku forced a smile on his face and it didn't suit him at all. "It was bound to happen someday."

"That girl was there." Images of her lifeless and limp on the ground flashed through his mind, and that ground looked familiar. That room looked familiar. That copper pipe twisting onto itself and up and into--

Riku nodded slowly, waiting.

_A key that unlocks hearts--_

Roxas's head shot up from his hands, and he felt that expression on his face again, the wide-eyed one that didn't belong to him. Felt it and watched Riku just nod again while he murmured, "No."

"Yeah," Riku said.

_Sora considered the dark Keyblade in his hand, the girl at his feet, the behemoth of a keyhole before him shifting on itself and barely withholding the eternity of darkness beyond it. It was ridiculous, how he didn't even have to think about it. How he knew immediately that this was the right thing to do and that somehow, everything would be fine._

_Whether 'everything' included Sora or not._

_He turned the Keyblade so the tip of it pointed at his chest, and had the presence of mind in that instant to turn his head, find Donald and Goofy and give them his best, brilliantly idiotic smile that said yes, I'm about to do something insanely stupid, but you guys are just gonna have to trust me on this one. It'll be fine._

_Then he shoved the blade into his chest._

_It was a strange sensation, feeling his heart slip out of his body. It was almost like warm water, like a hot shower turning off and leaving him cold. It was a strange sensation falling backwards and never landing--just continuing on as the darkness closed around him. Like falling asleep._

_He wondered if Riku--_

_..._

Roxas's arms were wrapped around his chest, fingers digging into his own shoulders and he seriously never thought that he'd ever find a memory that he wanted to forget again so badly. It was too real and too ridiculous, the seamless decision his Other had made. No second thought, no hesitation, just one last ponder over the boy that maybe he loved before drowning in oblivion. Death. "Why did you tell me this?"

"I didn't." Riku's voice was cool and even, tinted slightly with what might have been regret. "You remembered it."

"Why did you make me remember?" He was shouting now, fingers digging deeper and his voice was shaking. It was shaking and he could curl his hands into fists to make them stop but his voice couldn't be curled or clenched or tightened into stillness. "What makes you think I wanted to know that _I did this to myself_?"

Something in the back of his mind chided, I told you so...

"It was your right to know," Riku said softly. Like he understood, but he couldn't have.

"You have no idea," Roxas hissed through his teeth. "What it's like, being half-alive. No idea." No idea, the terror of discovering your heart is just _gone_. No idea, like Demyx had said, the frustration of wishing you could feel. No idea, what it is to know that you're Wrong and know it so well that you never look in a mirror or a darkened window or a fucking puddle, even, and some days the sound of your own voice drives you insane. No idea, the lack of memory and the lack of purpose and how you'd sell whatever was left of your soul just to know _Why_, dammit.

"Look at me."

He did, still clutching and clawing his shoulders like he wanted to tear himself apart, teeth clenched and bared like he might do the same to Riku while he was at it. The eyes behind the blindfold would have been soft, apologetic, he thought, if Riku's expression had been complete.

"You have to understand." Riku leaned forward, elbows on his knees, gloved hands knotted together. "Sora knew Heartless. He expected what would happen, he probably counted on the Princess being there to bring him back. And she did." He licked his lips, that same expression from the other night but they weren't swollen with kissing this time. "No one ever explained to him--to any of us--about Nobodies."

Dimly, Roxas realized that was the first time Riku had acknowledged what he was. He was trembling too hard to process this, though. "I did this to myself."

"You didn't know what you were doing." Riku stood abruptly and closed the space between them, grabbing Roxas's hands and jerking them away from his shoulders and any damage they might be doing. "Listen to me. You didn't know what would happen. And--Roxas," Riku choked the name out like it pained him to say it, "if he knew about you, nothing in this world or any other would keep him from finding you."

A long moment passed in silence, then Riku let him go and turned to leave, walking with a slow deliberation. "I just wanted you to know."

"Why." It wasn't a question, really. It was a demand to the universe in general. Why, all of this.

"Because the next time we fight, it's for keeps." Riku made a motion with his hand, like an abbreviated wave. "And then neither of you will ever see me again."

"What the fuck," Roxas growled, and if he wasn't shaking he would have jumped up. Grabbed Riku and slammed him into the wall and browbeat him until he stopped saying stupid shit like that. "Don't be an idiot, Riku. Do you really think he's going to put up with that?"

Riku just shrugged a little, laughing softly--like he really didn't, in fact.

That was the second time he thought about leaving.

* * *

Some nights the paper lantern seemed brighter, like the gold light had been polished to a brilliant shine that danced over the walls and the furniture and the tangled sheets, and he would lie on his back and watch it while the sweat cooled on his body.

Axel was always restless afterwards--after the initial exhaustion, at least, and he never settled until he was half-draped across Roxas and nuzzling his stomach. It tickled, and his hair felt itchy, but Roxas never wanted him to move. He would usually shove one hand behind the pillow he was lying on and thread the other in the fine hair just above Axel's ear, and some nights he fell asleep like that.

On this particular night he said, "I think it's my birthday."

Axel didn't say anything for a minute, thumb tracing a small circle on the skin just next to Roxas's navel. "I don't think any of us really celebrate that. Except Luxord, but he'll use any excuse to get everyone playing cards with him. Which, you should note, is a very, very bad idea."

Roxas hummed in response to that, considering the pinpoint stars of light on his ceiling while Axel placed three precise kisses just beneath his ribs, followed by three small nips in the exact same places. He shivered a little and shifted away from the touch in mock protest. "It was kind of a fuck-lousy day, come to think of it."

"Feeling's mutual," Axel murmured, nuzzling lazily and trailing fingers over one hip.

"When's your birthday?"

"Not telling."

Roxas dropped his hand out of Axel's hair and tilted his head to the side, into the crook of his elbow, to look down at him. "Why not?"

"Because this way, you have to sleep with me every night to make sure you don't miss it."

* * *

It was more on the pouring side of rainy on that particular day, as opposed to the 'sprinkling' side. Which meant, for the most part, that the edges of his unzipped coat were getting wet from sitting on the balcony, even pressed as far back against the wall as he was. Xigbar stood in the middle of it without notice, one gun settled carelessly on his shoulder.

"Pull!"

Roxas was a few beats behind that day, so at the sound of Xigbar's voice he was only just reaching into the box for the next figurine. And he kept reaching. His hand met crumpled tissue and plastic and cardboard. He shuffled through the detritus for a moment before finally looking up, watching the man examining him and his lack of trap-loading with one eye. "They ran out."

"Huh." Xigbar remained in that position for a moment before lowering his gun. "How far do you figure you can throw that box?"

Roxas narrowed his eyes for a moment, because Xigbar himself had taught him better. "It's too light to achieve a proper trajectory."

"Damn right." Xigbar kicked the cardboard with one toe resentfully, like it was the box's own fault that it was empty. "Have to find something else, I guess. Keep an eye out when you're off-world. Something suitably ugly and deserving of destruction."

Roxas muttered something like assent and pushed the trap towards the corner where it was safe from the rain, its shelter in between target practices. He moved to get up but Xigbar waved a hand at him, backwards; he was crouched now with the scope of his gun leveled against the balcony railing, his good eye examining something in the city below. "Just stay put for a second, will you? You're too damn jumpy lately."

He wondered, for a moment, just how everyone seemed to notice this--and for a moment he considered just getting up and leaving anyway. But Xigbar was poised with the scope in a strangely pointed way, and he shifted slightly as though following something below.

Roxas stayed put. "Everyone always fucking _knows_," he muttered, and it was meant to be offhand and too low to really acknowledge but Xigbar chuckled.

"You're not as discreet as you think you are, kid. It's not your style." Xigbar cocked the weapon abruptly, arming it, still slowly following something in his scope. "And then some things are just obvious."

Roxas felt his back teeth clenching together, hard enough that his jaw popped, and wondered if he was talking about Axel.

Xigbar chuckled at the silence. "Way to prove me right." His finger tapped against the trigger almost idly. "On another note, I have the brat in my sights right now, you know. I could take him out in one shot. Whad'ya think?"

"Don't." Roxas said the word instantly, and wondered if it had really come from him or if Sora's memory had shoved it into his mouth. Xigbar leaned back from the weapon to regard him, finger dropping from the trigger, and it seemed for a moment like the lines on his face were sharper.

"Have you ever thought that maybe there aren't any answers?"

Roxas started, nearly a jump, head knocking back just slightly against the white wall behind him and mouth unconsciously falling open. No, he had never thought that. Not once. There had to be a reason for all of this, a purpose and a meaning. Because if there wasn't, then what was the point? He might as well have jumped that first day, when Axel explained what a Nobody was.

He said, "That's not possible."

Xigbar laughed--it was loud and hearty, rolling through him in great jerks of the shoulders. "You're a rare breed, kid. A true idealist. Just like him."

Roxas felt his tongue wet his lips. "Who?"

The man rolled his shoulders and then his eyes, waving a hand dismissively. "Sora. The brat told you where he was, right?"

He wasn't sure what shook him up more--the fact that Xigbar was talking so openly about his Other (and remembered him to talk about to begin with), or the fact that he was doing so with such a casual air. Like it didn't matter. Like Axel hadn't drug him from the Castle in the middle of a screaming storm to tell him something he was so certain he'd be killed for.

"Don't read this the wrong way, okay?" Xigbar said abruptly, like he'd guessed what Roxas was thinking. "Xemnas has goals and I support them. I'll do what it takes to see them through, but kid--I know the facts. All of them. I knew that when I made my decision."

He didn't have to add, _and you didn't_. It was painfully obvious.

"This is what I figure, Roxas." Xigbar dropped to sit against the railing, dismissing his gun into the netherspace it resided in when not shooting ugly ceramics out of the sky. "It's your life. Not much of one, maybe, but it's still yours to use or waste or fuck up however you want. So whatever anyone might say, whether it's the grand high mucky-muck or that brat running around down there with the shadow-rats--what they think, what they want, it doesn't matter. If you don't want to do something, then don't. If you don't want to be here, then leave."

Roxas just stared at him blankly, for several long minutes, watching the drops of ran streak through the air between them. And he thought, maybe he'd just been waiting for someone to say it. To give him permission--or maybe not that, specifically. Just to say that yeah, he really did have the right to do what he wanted. That he might be a prisoner but he could always leave if he only had the will to do so.

After about ten minutes of this Xigbar finally rolled his eyes and growled, "Get outta here."

He could have said something--thanks, or something else appreciative, Roxas supposed. He didn't, though. He stood up, zipped his coat, cast a glance sideways at the man sitting carelessly in the rain, head tilted back and drops creating little circles on his eyepatch, arms folded like he expected some kind of retort.

Roxas thought he might have smirked a little as he left the balcony. He thought Xigbar might have chuckled a little, somewhere behind him, and he figured that was good enough.

* * *

Some days, Roxas would sit at his desk and try to organize his thoughts on paper. The notion had seemed easy, at first, when he initially thought about it. He'd make a list, articulate all of the things he knew and all of the things he still wanted to know.

What happened, though, was that he wrote a letter instead.

_Dear Sora,_

_You probably don't know who I am, but that's okay--I really don't know who you are, either. I remember things sometimes, though. Little pieces of things, like your mom and your island and that girl. You know the one. I don't know what her name is. I even remember the gummiship and those weird friends of yours. And sometimes I think I might feel jealous, because you always look like you're having fun._

_My name is Roxas. I'm 397 days old. I live in this castle in a city where it's always raining. Everything here is mostly gray and not very real, and sometimes it's just mind-numbing being surrounded by nothing. I guess, though, that so far it's the only place I have to go back to, and everyone else here is like me._

_I used to be gray, too. But now I'm black and white, and in the split between the two of them, I can see you._

_I told Axel, once, back when he explained to me what a Nobody was, that I thought that there must be a reason for all of this. I've always thought that, since the first day I was alive, and I guess I still think that or I wouldn't be writing to you and trying to explain it. The Why of all of this. I thought it must be simple once, too. It's kind of terrifying and... final, I guess, when you put your hand over your chest and realize there's nothing there._

_I changed my mind, though. I figured it out. It's not that my heart is just gone, or that it was ripped away. It's still there--I'm just further away from it than most people._

_I think I can feel it, sometimes._

_Axel is the one who told me you were alive, but he still won't tell me anything else. Sometimes I think he won't tell because he really is afraid of being killed for it. He's a slave to the Organization like that--and it's sick and... ironic, I guess, because he doesn't even like them to begin with. He just doesn't want to know what it's like to not exist--not in the way that Nobodies don't exist, but to not exist _at all_._

_Sometimes I think he won't tell me because he just doesn't want me to leave._

_I met your friend Riku. And you should know, he's going to try to hide from you. Don't let him. Go find the bastard and slap him upside the head for me. In fact, tell him it's from me._

_Then kiss him. Tell him that's from both of us._

_I don't know what's going to happen when I finally leave this place. I don't know if I'll ever get to where I'm going. But I'd like to think that even if I don't, you'll still get this letter. Because you need to know the truth._

_The truth is, sometimes I wish I had never left the castle I was born in. The others call it __Hollow Bastion--I think you know the place. You must know it, you were there. Sometimes I wish I had talked to that man, the one with the scar on his face. He must have been a friend of yours._

_The truth is, when I think about what I could have done, how I could have found you if I had stayed there--I don't know. I could just tear the universe apart._

_The truth is, I want to believe that you really didn't know what you were doing when you shoved that Keyblade in your heart. That you didn't know you were splitting yourself in two and that just putting your heart back in place wasn't going to heal the wound._

_The truth is, I still don't know why I'm here, and I don't know if I ever will, and that scares me more than anything else._

_The truth is, I don't blame Axel for not telling me how to find you._

_The truth is, I want to believe what Riku said--that if you knew about me, nothing and no one in this world or any other would keep you from finding me._

_But he also said that you were sleeping, and that means you still don't know. And the truth--it's just too important to pass either of us by like this. It might be more important than anything._

_That's why I'm coming for you. I'm going to wake you up and tell you everything, and I hope you'll tell me everything, too. I think we're meant to fix this, Sora. I think we're the only ones who can. And if that's the truth, I may never regret anything again._

_You might not recognize me, but I look a lot like you. If you see me, don't be afraid. If you want to fight me, we can fight. If you want to talk, we can talk. If you don't want to do anything, that's fine, too._

_Whatever happens, I'm going to find you. Nothing and no one in this world or any other will stop me._

_Love,  
Roxas_

* * *

The air seemed like it was coiled and tense that night, another deep breath the world had taken and was holding tightly, eyes watering and lips turning purple, until it was ready to exhale. Even the lantern-light seemed to flicker against the walls, though that may just have been the effect of sex. Hard sweat-slide and burning inside him, bone-deep pleasure in long shudders, eyelids fluttering closed when his head dropped back. Fingertips drawing fire on his skin.

Axel murmured his name against his collarbone, and every movement was agonizingly slow--like drawing the moment out would make it last longer. Maybe he had an idea, there.

He tried to say a name back and cursed instead. Axel chuckled softly and nipped at his skin, pushing a little harder.

He didn't say anything coherent after that.

"You know," Roxas murmured sometime after he came back to his senses, and even then there was still a low tremor in his body, like some of the cells that collectively formed his physical self hadn't quite figured out that the orgasm had passed. "You haven't slept in your own bed in weeks."

"Six weeks," Axel replied, speaking directly to the curve of his shoulder in small puffs of air. "And two days."

The eighth emotion he felt wasn't really there at all. It was just a soft whisper, somewhere in the empty space in his chest. It was both like and unlike the small flicker that Riku sometimes induced. This one, Roxas decided, was specific to Axel.

He wondered what it was called.

He never really fell asleep that night, just dozed on his side, Axel face-down next to him, one arm around the pillow and the other over his hip, fingers splayed over Roxas's back, right between the shoulderblades. He knew he was only dozing because no matter what half-dream images fluttered across his mind, he could always feel that hand.

When he opened his eyes, the gold spots of light on the walls were perfectly still.

It was the third time he thought about leaving, and the last.

He indulged, just for a minute--shifted closer across the sheets and prodded until Axel kissed him lazily without waking up, fingers flexing softly against his back. Ran his tongue across Axel's lips slowly, memorizing the taste and the smell of his hair, still a bit damp with sweat. Just for a minute, in that small circle of warmth.

He shifted away slowly, inch by inch, until Axel made a low, breathy noise in his sleep and wrapped his arms tightly around the pillow, clutching it close. He got up slowly and dressed silently, pulling on the boots and gloves last--coat already zipped and hood drawn up.

He thought about taking something with him. A memento of some sort. The lantern was his favorite possession, but it was too large, too bulky to be dragging along. He scanned the contents of his bookshelf, gaze landing on each object in turn before dismissing it. He considered the book the longest, thinking that maybe he could try opening it. Reading it.

He decided, though, that if he could only have one regret, he wanted it to be the regret that he had never read that book. That one, at least, he could live with.

He paused just before turning away, something white near the bottom catching his attention. He leaned down, and just at the edge of the bottom shelf a bare edge of paper was sticking out, no more than a sliver.

He knelt down and carefully pulled it out, gloved finger catching easily against the paper, and even before it was fully visible he knew what it was. And it had been there the whole time, hidden beneath the bookshelf, sitting there underneath all his memories.

Roxas lifted the paper in the lantern-light, turning it over and watching the shadows reflected through it. The curves of ink repeated over and over across it, on both sides. A thousand times.

He folded it and placed it carefully in his pocket, then turned to observe the rest of the room. The sleeping red and gold-speckled shadow in his bed.

There was a moment, just then, that he almost jumped forward. Almost crawled on the bed and shook Axel awake, raining hard kisses on his mouth and begging him to come with him in between.

_We'll go together. We'll leave and never come back. Never look back. Never regret._

Roxas knew what the answer would be without ever having to ask. He closed the door softly behind him.

He could have portaled away quickly, been out of the castle and out of the city and off-world in a matter of moments, far from the reaches of anyone who might pull him back. It would have been fast and easy and clean, but he didn't want that. He wanted the tangible finality of walking away.

It was arrogant; even he knew that. It was entirely possible that he would be caught. That someone would see and know and go find Xemnas to tell him that his trump card was walking out the front door.

None of that mattered, though. This was his life. He wanted to walk through the corridors and down the stairs, like he had in the early days when he'd just arrived. There was the balcony Xigbar shot his ugly figurines from. Here was the ballroom he used to practice calling the darkness in. This was the hallway where he'd sat on the fifth day in this Castle, struggling in vain to call a weapon he didn't know the name of. Here was the arched doorway Axel had led him through on his first trip into the city.

He paused at the door and didn't have to look to note the Dusk at his side, confusion in its warped body and shifting presence.

_...Master?_

"I'm going to be away for a while." Roxas watched the _thing_ cock its bizarre head from the shadows of the hood, wondering if lesser Nobodies knew what a lie was. "While I'm gone I want you to listen to Axel."

_You... wish us to obey the Flame?_

"Yes."

_But our master is the Key._

"Yes, and your master's orders are to obey Axel. Will you do as I ask?"

The Dusk bobbed its head uncertainly. _As you wish, my liege._

"One more thing." Roxas dug into his pocket for the envelope, grasping it tightly for a just a moment before handing it over, watching the Dusk's tentacle fingers wrap around the paper.

_Whom shall I deliver this to?_

"The Keyblade Master. His name is Sora." It had been his own name, once, and he wondered when he'd changed his mind. "You are not to lose it, or pass it off, or show it to anyone else. Understand?"

_Of course. It will be as you command._

The Dusk bowed deferentially as he turned to leave, facing the archway and the bridge and the city beyond.

He would walk through it, one last time. The city had always been his.

* * *

In retrospect, Roxas figured he really should have known better.

"Where the hell do you think you're going?" the voice out of the shadows asked, and he felt it like fingers across the back of his neck, soft as the rain falling on his shoulders.

"I didn't figure you for the sneak-off-in-the-dead-of-night type, Roxas," Axel murmured, and his arms were folded, leaning against the wall and Roxas could almost see his eyes glowing green in the dim neon gloom of the city. His teeth were set behind his lips, and it wasn't even battle-serious. Just... "Not a word, not a warning, not even a fucking 'dear John' letter. I'm just supposed to wake up and wonder where you went."

Roxas pushed his hood back and looked over at him, because it should have been obvious why. Because he couldn't have climbed out of bed and into his clothes and walked out the door with those eyes watching him go. He couldn't have left if Axel knew he was going and where and why because then he'd be an accessory, he'd have information Xemnas could punish him for.

Axel stared back for a long minute, and after a while that expression shifted just slightly, pulled just a little around his mouth and Roxas knew it, then.

_Don't you ever wish you could feel bad?_

"So. That's it, huh?" Axel wasn't looking at him anymore, focused somewhere over his shoulder instead.

For a moment, he wanted to let Axel pull him back. Wanted to follow him back to the Castle and back to his little gray room with the yellow paper lantern and decide to just stay a while longer. Just stay there in the comfort of routine and curl up between the sheets at night and let Axel hold him, kiss him, coax his body into heat and sweat and press into him until he shuddered because that was closer to feeling than anything else. Because Axel could say things like 'Six weeks and two days' and mean something that had nothing to do with those words.

But he couldn't stay, and Axel wouldn't go with him, so he said, "Yeah."

Any argument that followed would die in the face of that one word.

* * *

The skyscraper seemed like it was lit brighter than usual that night, and this is where he found his first point of contact on the path of his new quest. The direction he'd decided his life would take, and it didn't really surprise him that Riku would be the starting point. Riku was the only actual piece of Sora he'd ever had, the only tangible presence in his life that belonged to his Other--aside from the Keyblade, but that was something else.

"Where's Sora?" he asked, and blocked a swing from the white key. Riku was smirking a little more tonight, moving a little faster and enjoying himself a little more than usual. Roxas had an intent aside from fighting, this time around, and he thought it felt like his opponent did, too.

Something was going on. Roxas could sense it, like the crackle of lightning and ozone in the air. Electricity.

"You promised!" He yelled it because Riku didn't answer him, just chuckled and danced away, a flutter of silver in the darkness. White and black clashing and sparking and retreating again.

"I did," he said after another pass, corners of his lips turning up in something that was half-tease, half-predatory. It made the fear that had been lounging quietly in Roxas's stomach for so long perk up and wriggle uncertainly. "I also said that the next time we fought was for keeps."

_And neither of you will ever see me again._

He wondered if he trusted Riku because his Other trusted him, with an implicit childlike nature that stretched beyond the darkness and destruction of their home and the betrayal and more betrayal and the aching longing for things to be the way they were. On their island, with the sunshine and waves and sand, footraces and wooden-sword skirmishes and their secret, stolen moments in the little hidden cave.

He wondered if maybe this wasn't the answer he wanted. If maybe he should call this off, whatever agreement kept him and Riku seeking each other out. If maybe he should walk away and find Sora on his own.

The air around him popped and crackled. "What the hell are you doing, Riku?"

Riku smiled, brilliant flash of teeth before it tightened, turned into something false. "I'm going to take you to him."

Roxas hissed through his teeth, and then it happened--the same as before, the flash of movement and a speed he couldn't control, couldn't block. Felt the pain in his head and the eerie sensation of flying backwards. He was never entirely sure when he fell, but knew he had because he couldn't breathe and everything hurt from the impact.

He knew, somewhere in the back of his mind, behind the shock and the pain, that he'd made a horrible mistake.

"I told you not to let your guard down."

He should have seen the move coming. Should have known that Riku's motives were impure, should have seen that in the look on his face, even with the blindfold. Sora would have known it, even through his childish trust and loyalty. Sora had seen it before.

_"Come with me."_

_Riku's lips were brushing the curve of his ear, sliding down to catch around the lobe and suck gently, fingers clutched tightly in the back of Sora's jacket and digging for the fabric beneath that and the skin beneath _that_. He was close, close and warm and familiar, the smell of him all around and the feel of him so comforting._

_"Come back with me, Sora. Please. I need you beside me. We'll fight together and find a way to save her. It doesn't have to be like this."_

_Breath against his neck, small, unhurried kisses along sensitive skin. Riku's fingers uncurled and caressed slowly, slipping around his hips and pulling him closer._

_Sora shivered. Shivered, slid his palms over Riku's shoulders and let himself be drawn closer, warmer, and part of him wanted to give in to those hands and lips and the whispered words and promises. Part of him thought that if he did, he could pull Riku back from the brink of whatever cliff he'd found for himself, back from his own arrogance and fear and the curled claws and lying purr of that witch._

_"I know now, Sora," Riku whispered and his breath was hot against his cheek, then his lips, low and fervent and husky in a way he'd never heard before and his eyes were half-closed, emerald-dark and his mouth curved up in something that wasn't his real smile. "What to do." A hand slid over his hip, down and back up, fingers pressing through the cloth. Over his stomach. "I won't pull away anymore."_

_Mouth hot against his, slow and hungry and promising more. Promising not to stop. Seducing, softly and gently, coaxing him to give in. To listen to the kisses and caresses and half-truths. To give up._

_Sora knew this wasn't real._

_He said, "You taste like darkness." And pulled away._

On his back in the street, in the rain, Roxas choked on something that might have been a sob, but he couldn't cry. The world spun when he opened his eyes and he saw silver and black. Felt that hand on his cheek, smooth leather of a glove just like before. A slow caress and soft lips pressed against his.

"I'm sorry," Riku whispered and the breath against his skin was too familiar. "I'm so sorry."

He was hurt, weak and his consciousness was failing, but Riku was close enough that he could reach up. Tangle fingers half in his hair and half in the strip of fabric that covered his eyes, and tug it down.

The last thing Roxas saw before the darkness closed around him were Riku's eyes staring down at him, an honest sadness there, an honest apology and so, so much love for the boy that Roxas wasn't.

His eyes were gold, and not green. Xemnas was right. He would have laughed at the sheer irony that this was how his life was ending, but the white noise flickered across his vision and he never knew if he actually had or not.


	6. 6

**Standard Disclaimer:** I do not own Kingdom Hearts. I do own a shiny new copy of the Red Album. But this has nothing to do with anything.

**Warnings:** Language, violence, boy/boy situations (up to and including sex), spoilers for KH, KH2 and probably CoM as well.

**Pairings:** Axel/Roxas, with some Riku/Roxas that is really Riku/Sora, and also some actual Riku/Sora. Par for the course.

**Casey would like you to note:** Final chapter. Thank you all for reading! If you have a few minutes and some words to say, please let me know what you think.

I'm aware that some of this doesn't line up with canon, particularly the parts revealed by Final Mix. I made this discovery after the fic was in progress and I already had the whole thing worked out. It concerned me for a while, but ultimately I decided to stick with the story as I originally envisioned it. Changing it would have compromised the integrity of the story, and that should become clear once you've read it. It just wouldn't have been the same. So—please forgive my willful ignorance.

* * *

**6.**

On the first day, Roxas didn't know anything aside from a sand-shaded town in a perpetual state of sunset. He didn't worry about things that didn't involve skateboards or ice cream or avoiding the barest mention of school while the air was still warm and heavy with summer. He didn't ask himself questions like "Why?" because everything was the way it was supposed to be. Or "How did I get here?" because he'd always been here, he was born and grew up here. He skinned his knees when he skated down that hill the first time, and he and Hayner had given themselves cold headaches with an ice-cream eating contest on that sidewalk when they were nine, and he met Olette for the first time in that corner of the tram common and he'd always thought she was cute, and one summer when they were thirteen he and Pence had the uncommon fortune (or misfortune) of having swiped Seifer's beanie and they hung it from the big hand of the clock on the station tower.

He was fifteen years old, and he lounged on the roof of a tram car while it lazily circled the marketplace, melting popsicle stuck in his mouth and watching the world pass with a quiet disinterest.

"Hey." Hayner shifted against his shoulders and elbowed him in the ribs, voice tilted and somewhere above and behind his ear. "Wanna go skate on Sunset Hill?"

Roxas shrugged slightly, disrupting the body leaned back against his, pushed at the heat bearing down on him that didn't really come from the sun, low and unmoving on the horizon. He didn't want to move at all. "Nah."

"Eh, me neither. Wanna head back to the usual spot?"

"Olette'll make us do homework or something."

Hayner made a suitably disgusted noise at this prospect and resumed devouring his own ice cream, content to sit in the heat and offer no further ideas on possible things to do. There was no necessity to do anything.

He wondered, then, why there was always a thrum somewhere under his skin telling him to move. Sometimes... sometimes it screamed at him to _run_. And he'd wonder what it was that he wanted to get away from, what made the hair on the back of his neck prickle and made his tongue wet his lips, waiting. Waiting for something to happen.

"You're quiet today, man." Hayner shifted again, and their combined sweat from the heat of the day and the metal roof of the car was making a damp spot where their backs met. "I mean, it's fucking hot and hell if I want you to talk my ear off or anything, but seriously."

Had a weird dream last night, Roxas thought, and wondered why he instantly didn't want to voice it. "Got a lot on my mind."

"Yeah, right." Hayner's head knocked backwards against his, mostly painless, then it dropped to rest heavy on the curve between his shoulder and neck. His hair was itchy, and the heat didn't help.

Roxas wondered why he thought that was familiar, and frowned. "Shut up."

"Hey, if you're a deep thinker, I should go out for the chess team. And then Seifer'll start wearing polo shirts and volunteering at the old folks' home. And you'll grow the stones to ask Olette out before Pence does. And--"

"And," Roxas interrupted, mouth curling into a grin around the popsicle stick, "why is it that you never factor into this supposed love triangle?"

Hayner scoffed. "I don't require a female to point out my flaws and demand my obedience. I have you for that."

Roxas laughed softly, batted a gelled curl away from his nose and made a low, whipcrack noise through his teeth.

"Damn right." The voice rumbled against his back.

The station tower chimed to inform them that day was wearing into afternoon. Roxas chewed on the empty popsicle stick, still faintly sweet and salty from the ice cream. There were things he could be doing, probably, some more productive way to waste the summer than lazing it off in relaxed intimacy on the roof of a tram with his best friend, but despite the lure of skateboards and skirmishes in the sandlot and whatever new video game Pence might have and even Olette and her quiet smile and reprimand that yes, really, they needed to finish their summer homework before there was no more summer to finish it in--he found that he preferred the lazing. Even with the hum in his bones demanding movement, or at least alertness.

It was at this point that Hayner's presence at his back disappeared, leaving him to sprawl backwards onto metal, unexpected and nearly choking on the stick in his mouth.

Hayner was perched on the edge of the car, posture tense and coiled with a hard light in his brown eyes. Staring back as the tram passed a small knot of people who were pointing at them. Some word being tossed around.

_Thieves_.

"Something's up," Hayner muttered, reaching over to jerk him up by the elbow, and that was the end of lazing. At least for that day.

* * *

On the second day, Roxas stood alone in the back alley and held a stick in front of himself. He scowled at it, waved it in the air, scowled harder and willed it to spark. To shift and transform into the gold and silver key he'd held before.

He was supposed to know how to do this. The twinge in his muscles, the instincts that urged him to stay alert, to be on guard, to fight and run--they told him this. He knew how to do this. It was _his_.

He ground his teeth in frustration and flung the stick away, trying to dismiss the entire idea. It was stupid, it was pointless, and the key and those... _things_, they were some kind of aberration. A moment of strangeness in a normal town.

Why was it, then, yesterday in front of the mansion with that _thing_, when it spoke to him--he'd wanted to scream at it. Fling one arm out in a cutting motion and tell the stupid, stupid monstrosity that this wasn't what he'd told it to do.

A noise behind him startled him out of his thoughts and he turned just in time to see the flung stick bouncing off of a black hood--and the instincts startled and coiled, tugged harshly at him, and for some reason he thought of his dreams.

What the hell...

Somehow, he should have known. Later, he thought this--that he should have known that stick would appear out of nowhere when he least expected it. Flung back at him in a childish sort of retaliation. It was exactly the sort of thing that he would do.

Roxas didn't know who 'he' was supposed to be, anyway. He tried to dismiss it. He tried to dismiss everything but it just kept piling up. All the questions without answers.

* * *

On the third day, he met Namine.

She was like a breath of wind, cold and fleeting and colorless and she left him ruffled and uncertain of the way he had been before she mussed his composure. He was never quite sure if she was really there or if she was a product of the collective Wrongness that had invaded his normal existence over the past few days.

He watched these developments with increasing dislike, even as he reached to protect the wind-breath girl with the sad, pursed smile and wheat-shaded hair.

She was Wrong, he knew it with that instinct that he was starting to trust just a little more, just slightly. He knew she was Wrong, but he also _knew_ her. Somehow.

He wanted to dismiss all of this. Wanted to shove it away and go back to his summer, his friends and his casual lethargy and ice cream and skateboards with no further knowledge of zipper-mouthed white _things_ that spoke in his mind and strange-familiar men in black hoods who threw sticks at him and stole his munny and wind-breath girls who smiled and said his name like it was the saddest thing she'd ever heard.

He wanted his life back. He'd even take school starting early if it meant that everything would return to normal.

He wanted the dreams to stop, because he didn't know Sora and didn't know why his life was playing itself out behind Roxas's closed eyelids each night. Each night going a little further, and each morning he had to pause a little longer before climbing out of bed to remember who he was.

The thrum in his bones was telling him to run more often, now. To run, run far and fast and never look back.

When the Keyblade appeared in his hand when he called, he wanted to fling it away and do just that.

* * *

On the fourth day his assassin arrived.

He was tall and thin and angular, with hair the color of tomatoes that frizzed and stood on end like the hackles of something that was living in its own right. His eyes were green and wide and punctuated by thin diamonds of black on his cheeks, and for a moment while he was staring at Roxas across the empty Struggle arena, spectators frozen in time all around them, he had this look--

_Pain_.

--but then it was gone and replaced by a wicked grin, a voice that was test and tease at the same time. His eyes never quite matched his expression or the words he was saying.

"I don't know you," Roxas said, and something in his stomach curled on itself.

This had to stop. It had to stop, _now_. He didn't want this, the cold metal key in his hand or the guy with the red hair and green, green eyes or the other man, red bandage-wrapped, who spoke with the pompous authority of one who truly and honestly believed that he was in complete control of everything and everyone.

He wanted the green couch in his back-alley hideout with red bars of sunset arching through the slats above. He wanted ocean-blue ice cream and Pence with his white tooth grin beneath a perpetually present camera. He wanted Olette to smile at him and tuck her hair behind her ear like she did, because he never remembered whatever it was she said after she did that. He wanted wheels under his feet and the roof of the tram car and he wanted to notice that Hayner's eyes were the color of coffee when the sun angled through the pot just enough to make the liquid inside glow.

He was missing something important. There was a lie, somewhere, but he couldn't find it. Couldn't tell which voice was speaking it--so he used his own to drown them out.

If nothing else was true, Roxas himself had to be. If nothing else, he knew that he himself existed. He was real.

...Right?

* * *

On the fifth day everything collapsed--splintered, shattered, exploded in a kaleidoscope that by all rights should have shredded him to bits.

"You were never supposed to exist," Namine said, pale and colorless in her pale and colorless room, and he thought the utter sadness in that phrase was going to shake her apart.

He was starting to feel the edges of everything breaking. Unraveling. The fabric of the universe was coming apart, like all the bizarre machinations on Sunset Hill and the train that no one else could see. Maybe the world was ending. Maybe he was the catalyst.

He was starting to wonder if Sora was real, and he was the dream. The strange and confused dream of the Keyblade Master, hero of the worlds, straining to reach the red-haired girl on one side and the silver-haired boy on the other like he couldn't decide which one he loved more. So he dreamed of Roxas in a town where it was always sunset and never night, wavering eternally on the edge of light and darkness.

Trapped forever in the split between black and white.

* * *

On the sixth day, he remembered that it wasn't the sixth day. It was the four hundred and thirty-eighth. One year, two months, and thirteen days.

When he woke that morning he could feel himself fading in and out. When he stood in the center of his back-alley hangout he could feel the soft, delicate whoosh of air as his friends ran through him. Toward and into and past like nothing. He was substantial as a ghost and just as present.

He was the dream.

He laughed when he remembered. He laughed, and he laughed, and then he screamed and summoned the gold-and-silver Keyblade that wasn't his to smash the computer monitors and the console that operated them to bits, glass and metal flying around him and scratching blood across his skin and he kept swinging. He kept screaming.

Because he knew, now.

The truth was, he would never find the answer to Why, because Why didn't exist. It never had.

The truth was, everyone he'd ever known had used him in some way. Everyone.

The truth was, his life was nothing but a tragedy of remembering only to forget again. A slow repeat over and over. His own identity destroying him.

The truth was, there was no point. There was no reason. There was no purpose and no explanation. There was just him and the borrowed half of his existence that had kept him alive up until now. There were no lies because he was the lie and he always had been, from the moment he screamed himself to life on the blasted-out stone floor in Hollow Bastion.

The truth was, there had never been a Roxas, just a shadow and a thought of Sora that walked around by itself.

* * *

The last time Axel appeared before him, his heart would have broken if he'd had one to begin with.

He wasn't sure why they fought each other with such ferocity, except that maybe if it went on long enough they might have destroyed each other at the same time. Everything might have ended then, in the quiet of a burst of light and the flare of flames, darkness fading up and away like smoke pluming. The way that Heartless disappeared into nothing on the tip of a Keyblade.

It would have been a good death.

"Guess you're not gonna come back with me," Axel murmured, clutching himself around the stomach and curled on the floor, then chuckled, self-effacing. The sound was broken. "You were never gonna come back with me."

The corner of Roxas's mouth curled up, a half-smile like the ones he used to wear, to betray the clawing in his stomach. The way his senses were slowly dying. "You knew that when I left."

"Can't blame me for trying." Axel chuckled once more before his expression dropped, pulled down into wide eyes and a tight mouth, the same one he'd worn when Roxas first met him.

And he knew, now, what it was that wasn't being said.

_You're going to kill me, Roxas. Fuck, you're going to kill me but I love you anyway._

But he'd already said it was over, and maybe if he'd known he never would have left. Maybe he would have stayed in his prison where he was safe from all this but maybe that would never have protected him. He'd never know, just like he'd never know what might have happened if he'd stayed in the Old Castle--in Hollow Bastion, with the people there. The people he remembered now. Sora's friends.

He thought he could leave without regretting anything. Nothing, except maybe that unopened book.

But Axel disappeared into the darkness of a portal before his eyes, and he found that instead he regretted _everything_.

* * *

The pulse started in his fingers when he opened the door to the corridor lined with empty pods--all but two, a duck and a dog snoring away blissfully in each. Axel had laughed at him about that, his memory-dreams of giant talking animals. Yet here they were, just as he remembered them. Just as he remembered Sora remembering them.

It was faint at first. A low thrum that slowly moved up his limbs, down from his head. A slow beat.

When he stepped into the white room with the flower-bud behemoth in the center, it shuddered through him like a blow to the chest.

_Heartbeat_. It thudded in his ears, pulsed through his body and echoed in his chest. The edges of the world turned as sharp as razors and he didn't need that flower to burst into bloom to know what was inside.

Sunlight and waves.

The man in the red bandages stood before him, coldly malignant in the shadow of Sora's prison, cold walls and false words and whether it was kindness and sincerity that kept him there didn't matter. It was real, sure as the Castle that had held Roxas within it for so long even when the boundaries were no longer marked. It still owned him, and even now he would have returned to it if only it meant he wouldn't lose any more of himself.

"You should be happy," the man said and Roxas wanted to strangle that voice until it cracked and broke and died slowly. "As happy as one such as yourself can be, at least. You've finally found a use for your meaningless existence."

"No." Roxas said it and knew bone-deep that he was right. He had to be or the pieces of everything that had ever been his scattering around him like so many fragments of wood and glass had never even been there to begin with. Something had to have been real. Something had to have been his. "This is my life. Mine."

"It's never been yours, Roxas." The man laughed and it was emotionless and cruel, and surely it must be he who had no heart. Roxas could feel his own beating a bare span of inches away. "You borrowed it like a jacket to stave off the cold and now you must give it back."

"It's my decision!" The gold and silver key jumped into his hands and that, at least, was like an old and familiar friend but it wasn't his, either. His key was two, sleek black and silver-white. Something must still be his. "I have the right. It's my right to make it."

"You have nothing of the sort. You don't even exist."

He swung and missed, impossibly, but the man had never been there to begin with. Just a projection, just data, just the same artificial life Twilight Town had been built of, ideas crowded together into false comfort. A lie for him to live among. A lie, now, in front of his face to beat himself against with no possibility of ever winning.

There was nothing left. Nothing, only himself and the idea of whatever he might have been standing in the face of that flower as the petals slowly fell open, golden light washing over him like the memory of a small gray room in a large white castle with a lantern that danced false stars across the walls and a warm voice that nuzzled his ear and murmured things he'd never understand.

Sora hung there, suspended and limp. Sleeping. It was strange, how still and peaceful he was. Roxas wondered, for a moment, if it wouldn't be kinder to leave him here, quietly dreaming and free of the world. All the worlds. The light and the darkness.

"Why," he murmured through the pounding in his ears and the curl of fear in his stomach and the tears that were sliding down his cheeks only now, because he'd never been close enough to his heart to cry before. "Sora. You have to tell me Why."

But Sora was sleeping, and he couldn't respond. Couldn't explain anything, why Roxas was there to begin with and why he'd lived all this time only to lose everything and stand here empty-handed under the sleeping eyes of the boy who created him. "This is my life," he told Sora because Sora might actually listen and because Roxas still wanted to believe it. His voice was shaking around the tears. "It's my life! It's my decision!"

He was on his knees in front of the blossomed flower, collapsed on himself and curled over, but when he blinked--

_--he wasn't anymore. There was no white room, no pod, no cold-stale air and no echoing pulse to overwhelm everything._

_It was warm. His legs were dangling over the edge of a wooden platform, over slowly lapping crystal-blue waves. The air was red and purple with sunset, salt tang met his lips and the slow pull and release of waves rumbled around him. The world was snoring._

_"I know this place," he murmured._

_"You'd better." And there was bright laughter at his side. Brilliant like the sea under the sun. "Just because I lost all my memories doesn't mean we both have to forget."_

_He lifted his head and there was Sora, right by his side, tan and yellow sneakers and spiked chocolate hair and blue, blue eyes staring back at him. Like he'd always been there and all Roxas had to do was turn his head to look._

_"So," Sora said, legs swinging over the edge of the dock and his smile was rabbit-fur soft. "You're what I lost."_

_He didn't know, anymore, whether he loved Sora or hated him. Whether he wanted to scream at him _Why Why Why did you do this I hate you how can you smile at me like that _or if he wanted to fall forward into his arms, clutch him tight and never ever let go again._

_Sora didn't give him time to decide. No one did, ever._

_He'd expected some kind of reproach, maybe. An explanation that it's time to do this, now. We have to be one person again and go save the universe and etcetera, so come on already._

_What Sora did, though, was lean forward and frown in contemplation, then reach up and poke his cheek._

_Roxas jumped slightly from the sudden contact, which felt perfectly real although he was fairly sure the place they were in wasn't altogether real. He wasn't sure, in fact, that Sora was altogether real. He might just be a representation of their heart. A construct of his memory. Something._

_"What?" he demanded, and Sora sat back and laughed._

_"You look so serious," he tittered for a moment, then pulled a face in mockery. Narrow eyes and a deep-set scowl. Roxas paled at how similar it looked to his own._

_"That's not funny."_

_"That's not funny," Sora echoed, voice eerily similar, then the mock-scowl broke into a grin. "You're cool, Roxas."_

_"And you never take anything seriously."_

_"Course I do." Sora countered this with folded arms and a mock pout, and then the soft smile returned to his face. "I'm glad you found me."_

_Roxas shook his head slowly, turning to face the sun as it melted into the ocean. "It wasn't supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be on my terms." His fingers curled against the edge of the dock, clutching the wood until it creaked, until a cool hand uncurled one of them. Twined their fingers together and squeezed gently. He could feel the pulse between their palms._

_"I'm not ready," he stuttered around the lump reforming in his throat. The tears threatening to form in his eyes again and he wasn't sure what he was even crying for. For himself, maybe. For all the things he wished he'd done. "I don't even know if I want this."_

_There was silence and heartbeats for a moment, and then Sora murmured, "I'm sorry." And he knew the last door had closed. The last path was blocked and only one remained._

_"You can't do this," Roxas hissed and his hand tightened around Sora's until he was sure it was painful. "You made me. You killed yourself for that girl."_

_He thought Sora's look would have been angry, maybe, or at least sad, but it wasn't. It was tender and reproachful in a way he never really thought Sora could be. "You still don't understand."_

_"What am I supposed to understand? You're the one who did this!" Roxas jerked their twined hands up between them, holding them in front of Sora's face in accusation. Then, pitifully, he coughed against the lump still in his throat and buried his face in the tanned skin of Sora's wrist, squeezing his eyes shut against the beach scene and the boy before him that held his past and future precariously on a fingertip._

_Sora's voice was soft, laced with memory and old pain and a brightness that never really left. Not completely. "I didn't do it for her. I mean, yeah I wanted to save Kairi, but that wasn't all."_

_"What, then?"_

_Sora pushed him back upright, hand on his shoulder and his eyes were cool, blue and calm like the clear sky. "Everything."_

_He made it sound so simple. So easy. Roxas shook his head but Sora was lifting their hands, holding them steady and then twined they were grasping the Keyblade, gold and silver and reflecting red in the sunset._

_"You know what this means?" Sora asked like he didn't expect an answer; rhetorical, voice slow and even. He was all beach, sky and water and the movement of the sun. "This means we belong to the world. Servant, savior and sacrifice. It means we can't be selfish, even when we want to be. Even when it hurts. Even when it means we have to give up everything. Because if we don't, if we say no, everything ends." Sora studied him for a long moment, then laughed softly to himself. "I think you're the part of me that never wanted to be the hero."_

_And he was right. Roxas didn't. He'd never wanted this, but it was there and it was his anyway, whether he wanted it or not._

_"It's not so bad, you know," Sora murmured hesitantly, dismissing the key and returning their hands to the warm wood of the dock, still twined gently. "Being me. I mean, I've been doing it for fifteen years now and it's been pretty great."_

_He should have been angry, but he wasn't. He should have been sad, even, but all he could feel was cold resignation. He should have been screaming at Sora that this wasn't fair, it wasn't fair to even ask Roxas to give up and lay himself out on the altar of the universe so the Keyblade Master could continue being the hero of the worlds. He couldn't, though, because even his own tragedy was just a reflection of Sora's._

_Sora already knew all his arguments, all the pain and regret and the desire to continue on, to live--because all of that had been his to begin with._

_"Sora." Roxas said his name in a sigh and then chuckled softly, shaking his head. "Your home was destroyed and you were saddled with the task of saving the universe, your best friend fell to the darkness and your other best friend went without a heart until you killed yourself to give it back, in the process producing me, who you never even knew about until now. And then you lost all your memories and slept in cold storage for a year. How do you define this as 'pretty great'?"_

_Sora laughed and shrugged, rubbing the back of his head. "Everything worked out okay."_

_"You're unbelievable."_

_"I try." He hummed thoughtfully, releasing Roxas's hand and leaning back, pulling his feet up and climbing upright. He stood and stretched for a moment, hands falling crossed on the top of his head and staring out over the sunset, darkening now to maroon and violet._  
_  
"Just tell me one thing." Roxas swallowed hard around the lump and looked down at his feet, the shoes he'd worn in Twilight Town hovering over Sora's beach in a bizarre paradox. Maybe they connected him to something, and for a moment he wondered whatever happened to Riku's shoes. If they had just fallen into the void with everything else. "Just... tell me Why."_

Tell me that there was at least one thing that was mine.

_Sora was silent for a moment, hovering above him. "Why what?"_

_"Why am I here?"_

_"You mean, like, the meaning of life and all that stuff?"_

_He nodded slowly, watched a fish circle under the ripples below._

_"Roxas..." Sora spoke slowly and his voice wavered like he was trying not to laugh. To be polite. "No one actually knows that."  
__  
He stilled, abruptly. Considered this. Then the hand that had been entwined with Sora's reached up to cover his eyes and he barked a laugh. It caught to much against the lump for him to do it properly. "So it really was meaningless."_

_"I didn't say that!" Sora nudged his hip with a toe, yellow sneaker on his foot, until he looked up, and Sora's eyes were wide and bright with the purpling sky behind him. He really could be serious, sometimes. "No one knows the answer because everyone has to ask the question themselves. There's no universal explanation. You've been alive... what, a little more than a year now?"_

_"Four hundred and thirty-eight days."_

_Sora smiled faintly, not the ungodly soft one but a small one that was so true it almost hurt to look at. "Did you have a good time?"_

_Roxas blinked at him and considered that. Thought about those first few days of running and wandering and wondering, and the days after that of doing pretty much the same in a different location. Then sometime after that there were Heartless to fight, missions to go on. There was the city and the boy in black and Demyx and Xigbar and the clay pigeon trap on a random balcony and Axel. There were memories that were pleasant sometimes and even later, even those six days in Twilight Town that were never even real--_

_He smiled just a little, and realized it was a mirror image of Sora's. "Yeah. I guess I kind of did."_

_Sora brightened visibly and he could have replaced the sun. "And did you make friends?"_

_"Yeah."_

_His Other cackled intently and leaned over him, hands on his hips and eyes narrowing. "And was there someone you lo-oved?" Sora drew the vowel out to incredible length, eyes glittering almost like he knew._

_Roxas leaned away from him. "Maybe."_

_Sora laughed again, bright as sunshine and retreated back into his own space, rocking on his heels. "See? That's more meaning than lots of people have. And it's all yours to keep forever, no matter what. I'll keep it safe." Sora tapped himself on the chest with one finger, silent promise. "Here."_

_Roxas closed his eyes and let his head drop, silent and breathing the warm salt air for a long moment. He heard two footsteps receding along the dock before Sora stopped and turned to look back at him. He sucked in a deep breath, squeezing his eyes before opening them._

_"No slacking off," Sora chuckled, reaching a hand down for him. "I'm a busy guy, you know. People to find, worlds to save, Heartless to kill, etcetera. I only wish I'd found you sooner, we'd of had a blast together. You think?"_

_It was true. It was regrettable, but Roxas didn't think Sora had any room in among all his light for regret. "Yeah. It would've been fun."_

_He reached up. He took Sora's hand, warm clasp and a heartbeat between their skin and then Sora was pulling him up to his feet--_

--and he was standing again before the opened pod, flower petals spread before him in entreaty. The lump in his throat was still there. The tears were still wet on his cheeks.

His story was over.

The last thing he saw was Sora, suspended and sleeping and blissfully unaware and he knew that he wouldn't remember their conversation. That it had been for Roxas's benefit and not Sora's. He knew that Sora would never get his letter because Dusks really were stupid creatures and there was no telling where the envelope with the only written thoughts Roxas would ever leave behind had ended up.

The paper with his name written a thousand times had vanished, too. His only mark on the world were memories and he knew better than anyone how easily those were forgotten. In a moment, there would be nothing left to prove he had ever existed at all.

That, Axel, he thought, is what happens when a Nobody dies.

A trickle of golden light spilled out from Sora's heart, a trail of sparkle that glowed and grew and sighed when it approached him, and embraced him tightly.

It was warm, not like sunshine or summer but like a pulse underneath fingers. A hug. A kiss. Comfort. It threaded through him and around him and the last thing he was sure he felt with his own body was the water-warm shiver of disintegrating into it.

_Oh_, the light said in Sora's voice but it was more than that, and it was love and longing and sorrow and joy all at once. _I missed you._

And then his heart thrummed in his chest for the first and last time and he felt _everything_. Fear and happiness, sorrow and despair, anger, hope, despondence, hatred, joy and discontent and love--

His last thought was: I never told him, not even with a look or some silly phrase like 'six weeks and two days'. I never told him.

He supposed, now, that he never would.

He knew he was still crying, but his own emotions were going to vanish soon, anyway, even as he'd only just found them. The last thing he felt with the heart that had always been his but had never been with him was a cool, slow sadness that would settle into an ache that never quite left. He supposed that would be his legacy.

His last wish was to hear someone call his name. Anyone at all, just so long as they said it and cried it loud. But, as there was no one else present to grant the only desire left of a boy who never existed, with his last breath he did it himself.

"_Sora_."

* * *


End file.
